Sonus Networks announced an initiative that will combine the capabilities of Sonus Session Border Controllers (SBCs) and industry leading next-generation firewalls (NGFWs) to provide a truly unified security perimeter for enterprises.
The new solution addresses the growing need for enterprises to secure both IP-based data and SIP-based real-time communications in a cohesive, consistent manner as they migrate to Unified Communications (UC), said Sonus Networks.
Under the current UC security perimeter arrangement, firewalls and SBCs work independently to address data and real-time communications traffic, respectively. This deployment creates natural holes in the enterprise security perimeter that can be exploited during an attack.
In the new unified security perimeter, NGFWs and Sonus SBCs work together by exchanging security context to leverage their strengths and fill these security holes. Sonus SBCs deep understanding of SIP session characteristics can now enable NGFWs to take part in mitigating telephony denial-of-service (TDoS) attacks and theft of service attacks that might have been missed.
Similarly, the NGFWs payload scanning ability can help the SBCs blacklist bad actors sending spyware or other malware. By linking the NGFW and SBC platforms at the control-plane level, the unified security perimeter provides a holistic network defense system that makes real-time threat detection and mitigation a reality in both hardware and cloud architectures. This capability becomes increasingly important as enterprises move to cloud or software-defined network (SDN) architectures, where the network perimeter may now be logical rather than physical.
Mykola Konrad, VP, Product Management and Marketing, Sonus
By integrating the capabilities of next-generation firewalls with Sonus SBCs and leveraging the automation capabilities of SDN architectures, this new architecture delivers unprecedented security against data exfiltration, TDoS and many other UC threats.
Shawn Hakl, VP, Business Networking and Security Solutions, Verizon
The efforts by two of our VNF providers, Sonus Networks and Palo Alto Networks, to support cross VNF service chains is exactly the type of intelligent collaboration we had envisioned when we launched Verizon Virtual Network Services. The exchange of meta data between virtual functions to allow policy decisions based on complete visibility across the network will provide a level of security for enterprises that is simply not possible with individual point solutions.
