Verizon Expands Telepresence with Tata Communications

Verizon Communications is extending the range of its TelePresence offering to enable virtual face-to-face collaboration in more locations around the world, made possible by a new agreement with Tata Communications.

The collaboration enables meetings to take place between Verizon's telepresence customers and any public or private telepresence room on the Tata Communications Global Meeting Exchange -- one of the broadest telepresence networks accessible today and a gateway to the company's public room network spanning 31 cities on five continents.

This will supplement Verizon's telepresence offering powered by its expansive global Private Internet Protocol (IP) Network service. Similarly, Tata Communications telepresence customers can use Verizon's facilities to communicate with Verizon customers.

Enterprise TelePresence replicates face-to-face interactions so realistically that it feels as though everyone is in the same room, even though they may be hundreds or thousands of miles apart.

By leveraging collaboration technology to replace in-person meetings, telepresence reduces travel time and cost while lowering the carbon emissions associated with business travel.

As a result, the service makes collaboration among employees, customers, suppliers and business partners more efficient and economical.

"Video is the new voice for business, and it's becoming more and more available to meet the changing nature of work," said Farooq Muzaffar, Verizon vice president of enterprise network and communications solutions.

"As businesses expand beyond the traditional four walls of an office building, we're seeing more of our customers turning to advanced collaboration tools like telepresence for a bigger impact on their overall productivity and performance."

Verizon and Tata Communications customers currently can use Cisco TelePresence to conduct intercarrier telepresence meetings. Plans are under way to establish similar agreements with other immersive video providers and services to further expand the availability of telepresence.

Peter Quinlan, vice president, integrated business video services, Tata Communications, said "We are delighted to welcome Verizon to our global telepresence partner ecosystem. Intercarrier connections such as this one will benefit customers by offering a broader telepresence business ecosystem that connects regardless of network or service provider. It's agreements like this that fundamentally make telepresence a truly global collaboration tool."

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How to Stay Ahead of Hackers and Cybercriminals

My conversation with Jonathan Nguyen-Duy, Director of Product Management for Verizon, ended up being very thought-provoking. We were supposed to talk about a new security offering, a backbone-based solution aimed at stopping Internet-based attacks even before they hit a company's network. (I'd spoken previously to Nguyen-Duy about Verizon's risk-correlation service.)

Nguyen-Duy is a fount of knowledge about the changing landscape of international cybercriminals. Verizon is expanding its denial-of-service (DOS) detection and mitigation capabilities into eight network management centers serving 24 countries with new levels of scalability -- in part because of an increase in international cybercrime, according to Nguyen-Duy.

"Our customers are telling us that the frequency and complexity of DOS attacks has grown. We're now seeing cyberattacks based on social and political activism. We're also seeing less sophisticated hackers getting access to attack methodologies."

A case in point: consider the following related events.

Item: The Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, and Firearms, he says, recently arrested "the eBay of cybercrime" in Phoenix, Arizona which was selling automated attack programs, called botnets.

Item: A CIA official said at a conference that the recent power outages in South Florida were results of an unauthorized probe of the utility network originating from China.

Item: Crime syndicates are more frequently attacking financial services firms, online retailers, and government agencies for extortion purposes, in countries where there may be no laws or no enforcement of the laws.

"If you're a global enterprise or agency with deep pockets and a brand to protect, the challenge is real," Nguyen-Duy says.

"This gives rise to a clear problem: If you have a DOS attack that floods a device with five times the normal amount of traffic, do you have the capacity on site to parse through it and separate the legitimate traffic, and can you do it in real time so you don’t have degradation in service?" Remember that typical consumers won't sit through a transaction if they experience latency of more than 10 seconds.

Protection: Around the Clock, Around the Globe
No, we're not trying to write the script for Die Hard V here. However, because globalization is increasingly driven by the ability to share information anywhere, companies that take advantage of it are also making themselves more vulnerable.

Unless you want to deploy high-priced security experts everywhere you do business, it would be prudent to consider how expanded managed security services can protect your multinational communications network. And, thereby prevent the unthinkable from becoming a reality.

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Managed Security with a Strategic Twist

Managed services provider Verizon Business has added an interesting twist to its security toolbox. Traditionally, managed security services are tactical: they monitor a network for potential attacks, using virus signatures and other definitions.

Earlier this month, Verizon upgraded its customers' security capabilities with what it calls its "Risk-Correlation Service," designed to add strategic insight to security.

The RCS works with vulnerability scans -- either those it does for customers or those from vendors such as McAfee, Qualys, and others -- to determine where potential vulnerabilities exist. The service also documents your system to create a map of devices and the business processes that run on them. "It marries threat information with vulnerability information," says Jonathan Nguyen-Duy, Director of Product Management for Verizon.

Calculating Risks
The result is a Web-based scorecard that shows Verizon customers not only where potential problems exist, but rank the level of relative importance of those devices. "We can tell you the likelihood of an event on a particular device, but also the business process associated with that device," says Nguyen-Duy. "Using the information from the vulnerability scan, we can tell you about the impact on availability. Is the device running real-time transactions, or is it a database server that might have less sensitive information?"

Strategically, companies can use the information presented in the online scorecard to get a sense of where to improve their online protection. Not all information is created equal, and not every database server requires the same level of protection.

The scorecard is designed to help companies prioritize their security budgets and their business continuity programs. "With limited resources, it's important to understand the relative risk of each vulnerability," he says.

Protection from Attacks
The online scorecard also works when attacks are underway. In those instances, it helps customers work with Verizon to identify where remediation is most important. "Sometimes you have to work in real-time to figure out where attacks are happening," Nguyen-Duy says. "Your ability to respond is improved when you have better information on the threat and what business process might be affected."

Being proactive about security is like flossing your teeth; you know you should do it more often, but it doesn't always happen. Applying a methodology that combines both strategic and tactical security needs is very wise. Clearly, when it comes to security, it's easier to be reactive when you've already been proactive.

Besides, the complexity of providing comprehensive network security protection, and keeping it fully up to date, is something best left to the experts. That's why managed security is one of the most utilized managed service offerings.

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