Bill Wagner, President, Wagner Consulting

The Problem

Remote work is here to stay for financial and efficiency reasons. Leaders can either continue to bemoan that fact, or they can help their CIO’s craft a strategy that aligns the technology goals with the business goals, making remote work a force multiplier. Now IT leaders must combine this requirement with the trend towards collaboration platforms, and away from on-prem PBX’s or even cloud VOIP solutions. One might be tempted to say that going with a large provider means only the best security. Unfortunately, recent outages and security events do not support that conclusion. Here are a few examples:

• Microsoft and AT&T suffered prolonged outages so far in 2024. The issues were attributed to configuration changes. Wouldn’t you expect a firm that is ‘too big to fail’ to not build in a single point of failure, or to perform proper regression testing, and to have a strategy for immediately and seamlessly backing out and restoring services for such upgrades?
• CrowdStrike. Massachusetts E-911. Enough said?

 

Imagine that you manage first responders in an emergency scenario. You need to connect all your assets at once wherever you are and wherever they may be. Additional resources must securely be able to join as required. Can you press one button and do it securely without fear of failure?

Now imagine you are a remote worker in the financial industry. Your trader voice Hoot and Holler, intercom, shoutdown channels or even ARD and MRD are mission critical. If you are away from your desk and need the information, can you join in time? One such customer was using their PBX conference bridge for a hoot and anytime a user picked up their phone everyone else was treated to music on hold. They needed a dedicated secure system with android, IOS, windows or MAC desktops, and dedicated hardware instruments to accommodate how each trader wanted to use the system. XOP was able to accommodate each trader in the way they wanted to trade, not the way a vendor decides for them.

If your enterprise relied on any of the previously mentioned vendors, you lost the ability to communicate, productivity, and revenue. In the instances of 911, perhaps lives and public safety. The cloud means centralization unless your solution is architected properly, and even then you are betting your business on one vendor, one mistake, and the loss of your entire bundle of apps which are all in the same basket.

The Solution

There are multiple ways to provide secure remote access, and a solution must transparently support both and be device and network independent.

Hosting
Customers require a service that is highly available, diverse, redundant, and secure. A shared service is not for everyone, but whether it is shared or not, you should not be vulnerable. The solution should be available on prem, in a multi-regional cloud, in a datacenter, or in any hybrid combination that you desire.

Security
You have already performed your risk assessments and executed your IT strategy. You manage your own identity and access management (IAM) solutions. IT managers should not have to manage multiple systems, nor inflict your users with additional security inconvenience when you already use LDAP. So, if your user is remote, and they are logged into your network, the single sign on should be all they need to work in your environment because it fully integrates out of the box. You made an investment and plans, and they work. Your vendors should be accommodating you, not the other way around.

Access
We have addressed the hosting and secure parts of the problem. Now let us address access to the mission critical voice applications. There are numerous legacy services still in use globally. Not all firms are on the same evolutionary path. Remote access solutions must accommodate analog, TDM, SIP and WebRTC, and anything that may come next. That means you may need a gateway that can convert from whatever you are using, into that secure conferencing and collaboration system. Your users need remote access on demand and that can mean any PSTN device, a web browser, or any device they have access to at that moment.

Service Management
The system must provide an Administration Portal for you to perform provisioning, moves, adds, changes, and deletes at any time. You need to be able to create new conferences as your needs evolve. It must provide a recording interface or offer its own recording capability. And any data must be encrypted.

Conclusion

XOP Networks provides all these services in one solution that ticks each of these boxes. They are acutely aware that the acronym CIA (confidentiality, integrity, and availability) is a critical component of any security policy. Their solution has been used by vendors to provide over 1 million ports of secure services for over 20 years without a millisecond of downtime. Their customers include service providers, government, financial institutions, the military, first responders and more.

The XOP Networks’ Universal Services Node provides access and gateway from any network to their services. Their conferencing service provides the secure private conferencing you need, and their collaboration service provides the same service full multimedia experience as the big guys, but in a secure, private platform that will make sure that your information remains yours, not public on the dark web.

Dialing in from the PSTN whether cellular or VOIP, and a browser based, secure, private collaboration system can mean the difference between business as usual, or the loss of business, insurance claims, and lawsuits from your customers or against your vendors. I encourage you to contact them and discuss solutions for your specific requirements. Together, you can create a custom architecture that enables your users to leverage technology to achieve your strategic plans. Remember, I was an XOP customer, and I know firsthand the value of their technology solutions.

Bill Wagner is a financial industry technology consultant with over 30 years’ experience as an industry executive in hardware, software, engineering, operations, R&D, product development and introduction, and strategic development.