Unified Communications (UC) platforms such as Microsoft Office Communications Server and IBM Lotus Sametime provide enterprises with the ability to manage multiple communications modalities over an IP infrastructure to deliver improved collaboration, cost savings, and increased efficiency through rapid decision-making. At its fullest extent, UC encompasses every technology that integrates voice with other communications applications - email, instant messaging, presence, Web and video conferencing, and more.

The need for time-sensitivity and speed in communications has always been critical to success in business, and meeting security and compliance needs is of equal importance – from preventing malware and information loss over IM to meeting regulatory, corporate governance and e-Discovery requirements across all UC channels. FaceTime provides Unified Communications management, security and compliance solutions to help organizations derive all the collaborative benefits of UC without sacrificing efficiency gains, network security or corporate policy standards.

The Security and Compliance Challenge

Regardless of whether an enterprise-grade UC platform has been deployed users will continue to introduce real-time consumer applications into the enterprise, and IT is faced with an extremely complex and heterogeneous environment.

While UC delivers a measure of security within the application, those capabilities are not always sufficient to meet security, compliance and e-Discovery requirements. And while the use of consumer Web applications continues alongside UC deployments, those tools are hitchhiking on corporate network channels, introducing additional security concerns. They're using identities that can't be verified, so authentication and content filtering policies can't be applied to any information - conversation or files - traversing that channel. Public IM network connections use tunneling and port-hopping mechanisms to evade firewalls and prevent anti-malware products from checking the traffic stream for any malicious code.

FaceTime Secures the UC Infrastructure

Securing, managing, and controlling the UC platform is a corporate imperative for multiple reasons:

Introduction of malware - Real-time channels are increasingly targeted by malware, with blended threats hopping from public to enterprise networks.
Increasingly damaging malware - Not only are more attacks entering the network over real-time channels, but the attacks themselves are becoming more damaging. Crimeware, rootkits, exploits, and other malware are designed to bypass traditional security measures, and real-time communications channels only make that task easier.
Spam over IM (SpIM) - Just as malware is moving to the real-time communications platform to bypass existing security measures, spam is moving beyond the email inbox into the real-time stream, further increasing the risk of accidental malware introduction as well as increasing the traffic load.
Legislative compliance - Compliance regulations, including eDiscovery, largely apply to real-time communications conversations and chat threads just as they do to email records. Companies need to be able to "connect the dots" for all types of electronic communications, particularly when the installation spans multiple sites.
Leakage of intellectual property and other key confidential information - In the same way that malware can hop across peer-to-peer connections unchallenged, proprietary

Vantage is used by the world's largest firms to ensure security, management and compliance for Unified Communications - from presence and instant messaging to conferencing and voice - to safely enhance business productivity and responsiveness without endangering network security.

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Learn more about FaceTime Solutions for Microsoft Unified Communications

Learn more about FaceTime Solutions for IBM Lotus SameTime