BYOC: Putting Security Front and Center

Author: Beth Schultz, Vice President of Research and Principal Analyst

As enterprises across Canada and the U.S. migrate to the cloud for calling services, managed services providers (MSPs) must position themselves as leaders by adding bring-your-own-carrier (BYOC) options to their portfolios for customers looking for such a solution. As always, redundancy, scalability, security, and global reach are paramount, and the session border controller (SBC) plays an integral role in support of BYOC strategy. As they forge their new-generation voice services portfolios, MSPs must leverage an SBC vendor that offers enterprise-grade products and has embraced a multi-cloud strategy. This report will examine the changing landscape for enterprise voice services, demonstrate the value of the SBC in helping MSPs secure and manage their networks for a competitive advantage, and provide guidance on how to approach the SBC buying decision.

To achieve positive business outcomes for this strategy, MSP CxOs must guide their companies to:

  • Have a security-first mindset that allows for mitigating risks, providing high levels of control and governance, and assuring end-to-end security, security compliance, and support for security certifications such as FIPS 140-2 and ISO 27001, as well as support for NG911, as appropriate
  • Enable and secure a mobile workforce, which has become a priority due to new threat vectors across endpoints, cloud services, and enterprise applications and increasing numbers of ransomware, malware, and distributed denial-of-service (DDoS) attacks
  • Be cloud-oriented, enabling network future proofing in support of and integration with the cloud-delivered communications and collaboration applications that enterprises are increasingly obtaining from UCaaS providers
  • Take a best-of-breed SBC approach to achieve security, management, and quality control required for delivering highly reliable, available, and scalable voice-enablement services.

Table of Contents
  • Executive Summary
  • The New Hybrid Work Landscape
  • The MSP’s Role in Cloud-Based Enterprise Voice Services
  • Service Enhancement
  • Three Core Tenets
  • Achieving Positive Business Outcomes Around BYOC
  • Understanding the SBC’s Role
  • Recommendations and Conclusions