May 17, 2006
Written by Melanie Turek

Nemertes’ research shows that close to 95% of organizations are deploying, or have plans to deploy, voice over IP (VoIP) in the next two years. Doing so will certainly help those organizations lower their voice costs overall, as well as take advantage of IP capabilities to add new applications—and treat voice itself as an application going forward. However, among those companies, only around 23% are in the midst of a full VoIP adoption; among the rest, close to 30% are in the middle of a growing rollout, around 20% report a limited deployment, and just over 6% are still in the pilot phase. Furthermore, just over 50% of companies are or plan to extend VoIP to telecommuters. That means that today, the vast majority of organizations aren’t yet realizing the cost and productivity benefits of VoIP across the enterprise, or their entire employee base.

As a result, many employees are using consumer-oriented peer-to-peer voice services, such as those offered by Skype and Vonage, on the job, usually in an effort to save their employers a few bucks on interstate and international calls. But by their very design, these services pose significant security threats to any business IT infrastructure. As a result, IT executives are faced with a problem: Allowing their end users to act on their desire to save the company money, while not opening up their entire business to hackers and malware.