Call Accounting Boosts Telecom Security — Protects Your Bottom Line

In a survey conducted by Ernst & Young, nearly 90 percent of organizations they surveyed said information security was of high importance for achieving their overall business objectives. And yet, over 34 percent of the organizations rated themselves as less than adequate in their ability to determine whether their systems were currently under attack.

Clearly, most companies recognize the need for comprehensive corporate IT and telecom security practices. But effective security planning and implementations must go beyond the issues of "what to do" in the event of an attack.

While call accounting technology is widely recognized as a tool for managing and trimming corporate telecommunications costs, it can also provide critical data and direction to help shield enterprises from a variety of security vulnerabilities.

Attacks On Your Telecommunications Network and Resources

Attacks can come from a variety of sources and occur in a variety of ways. Finjan, a leading security solutions company, surveyed nearly 1,400 security professionals and found that 25 percent reported security breaches at their companies. Another 42 percent could not rule out the possibility that their data had been breached.

Two of the most common threats to the corporate bottom line are Toll Fraud and employee misuse and abuse.

Toll Fraud is the theft of telecommunication service or the use of telecommunication service to commit other forms of fraud by both internal and external sources. In 2006, the Communications Fraud Control Association conducted a survey and estimated that telecom fraud losses ranged between $54-60 billion dollars worldwide, up 52 percent from a similar survey in 2003.

But the most frequent cause of revenue drain is often simple misuse and abuse by employees. Though not overtly illegal, these small daily abuses such as Web surfing, excessive personal email and excessive use of telephony for personal use and long distance calls, can have a tremendous impact on company revenue and expenses over time, in both hard costs and lost productivity.

VoIP Vulnerabilities

In addition, the variety of telecom security threats faced by companies has increased as they have expanded their services beyond circuit switched voice. Voice over Internet Protocol (VoIP) technology translates analogue voice signals into a stream of digitized packets and sends them to recipients over data networks, allowing users to make phone calls over the Internet. But VoIP also offers multiple avenues for fraud and theft of service.

Since VoIP routes calls through the same paths used by network and Internet traffic, it has the same vulnerabilities and is subject to the same Internet threats. Much like data, VoIP traffic can be intercepted, captured or modified, so it requires a multi-layered infrastructure to provide automated, real-time responses to security threats to preserve very high-availability service demanded by telephony users.

Among these layers of protection, call accounting applications offer valuable threat detection, mitigation and management protections to shield networks from the kinds of slow downs or degraded service that can disrupt business and drain telecom expenses.

Compliance and e-Discovery Issues

Sarbanes-Oxley was enacted into law in 2002 and ushered in sweeping, long-term changes in the way publicly traded companies manage auditors, financial reporting, executive responsibility and internal controls. In December 2006, strict new rules for electronic discovery (e-Discovery) in civil cases took effect. And the current financial meltdown is sure to encourage an ongoing barrage of business regulations.

While email retention is getting a large dose of attention, corporate retention policies must cover telephone calls and voice messaging. Secure call records storage, archiving and easy retrieval capabilities make telephone transactions and record audits simple, cost effective and SOX-compliant.

Call accounting applications help facilitate regulatory compliance and sustainable corporate governance by providing tools to aggregate, monitor and analyze telecommunications data in order to correctly report expenses.

Call Accounting Offers Comprehensive Security Protections and Cost Savings

Most companies are familiar with how call accounting can help managers define employee productivity expectations and reconcile phone bills, but they don't always realize that this is only the beginning. Monitoring of telecom networks plays a critical role in any company's overall security program. In fact, telephone systems - along with corporate assets, trade secrets and other proprietary information - are vulnerable to the degree that companies don't have call accounting in place.

Best-of-breed call accounting applications offer:

• Comprehensive, user-definable call alerts to secure phone systems by continuously monitoring for call activity that is contrary to normal patterns and generating alarms when fraud attempts or abuse conditions are detected;
• Early notification of inbound and outbound security breaches and "questionable" calling activity before they escalate into costly episodes;
• Documentation of fraud-related costs to both substantiate telephony-related disputes with carriers and enhance corporate accounting practices;
• Curbing and/or eliminating employee misuse and abuse of phone systems;
• An effective and efficient means of monitoring both individual employee telephone practices and corporate telephony networks;
• Critical tools for enhancing physical security for the company and employees; and
• Broad protections to quarantee the integrity and availability of IT and telecom networks.

Telecom Security Depends Upon Innovative Solutions

Pragmatic, innovative security solutions that complement corporate business goals and objectives can help companies build sustainable competitive advantages.

Call accounting is a key tool in protecting a company's people, processes, assets and … ultimately, integrity. Few systems are as helpful in planning and maintaining effective security practices and management techniques to safeguard organizational assets (including intellectual property), responding to incidents, limiting exposure and liability in all areas of information management, and reducing financial, physical, personal and reputational risk.

For more information about SAI or to get a copy of the full version of the telecom security paper, complete our contact form or call us at (800) 775-0025, ext. 4585.