Security Like every technology, security must be fully considered (and integrated) within the context of any CCaaS migration. “If they can gain access to users’ devices or applications cybercriminals can elicit monetary value, often through the form of fraudulent calling,” said Mark Marquez, Executive Vice President of Technology at Momentum Telecom, an Atlanta-based provider of cloud voice, managed network, and unified communications solutions. “There are features like voice encryption that can help, but there are also advanced features in voice and web portals that can enable call forwarding, and, if a fraudster enables call forwarding to an international destination, they can ‘traffic pump” ‘calls into those numbers. There are a lot of things that people wouldn’t think about in the context of network security that can generate various types of fraud.” Cybercriminals will try to attack via customer devices, registration patterns, offshore IP addresses, scanning, and more. In addition to installing proper security systems, companies should monitor historical calls, call times, divergencies from call patterns etc. Compliance requirements also may be applicable. For more information, download AVANT’s 6-12 Report on IT security at www.goavant.net/security-report. Encryption, biometrics, multifactor authentication, and speech recognition are also important tools toward effective security. SD-WAN is particularly useful for supporting security in CCaaS environments, Marquez added. “Companies have gravitated towards SD-WAN from a security perspective because they can get more bandwidth and utilize multiple circuits at the same cost that they used to pay for slower MPLS circuits,” he said. “And then they can take encryption and encapsulation capabilities that SD-WAN incorporates for an additional level of security. Also, a lot of the SD-WAN offerings have built-in zero-trust firewall functionality, so they lock down automatically without having to build complex security policy. SD- WAN is also fitting in with the cloud-native SASE architectures and offers a lot that makes managing the wide area network a lot more feasible without needing a large staff.” AVANT’s initial assessments also show that customers often must satisfy specific compliance standards. Copyright © 2021 AVANT Communications, Inc. AVANT | CCaaS 6-12 Report | 16