A little reminder caught my eye in the VON Magazine news today

New Contributor - Hardware

Joe Pavlat (pavlat@picmg.org) will be writing our quarterly hardware pieces. Joe is President of the PCI Industrial Computer Manufacturers Group (PICMG), an industry consortium that develops open computer standards and founder of the Cypress Point Research consultancy. He has more than 30 years of experience in the embedded computer industry.

VoIP Hardware Today -- From Semiconductors to Appliances and Communications Servers. A nearly bewildering array of hardware is available not just to enterprises and service providers but vendors, integrators, and value- added developers too: Semiconductor devices for digital signal processing, interworking and transcoding. Small, multi-purpose gateways, session border controllers, mobile routers and IADs for businesses and homes. Rackmount communications servers for mid-sized and larger businesses. A tour of the varied hardware world of IP Communications.

Contact Joe Pavlat: pavlat@picmg.org

We'd also like to remind everyone that Edwin Mier (Testing/ emier@mierconsulting.com) and Ken Camp (Security/ ken@ipadventures.com) are our other Special Focus contributors.

Congrats and welcome to Joe Pavlat. And in case you missed very tail end note, I've joined the contributing team at VON Magazine with a focus on Security. I'm working on a piece on Securing the IP Enterprise now. Here's a blurb to give a sense of where it's headed:

Because of the mobility of both workers and their devices, the idea of a defensible perimeter around an organization maintained by conventional security devices configured to handle such a scenario (firewalls, session border controllers, intrusion detection/prevention systems, etc.) is falling by the wayside. Every device has its own interface and internal workings that are vulnerable to attack. Thus, every device has its own “perimeter” that must be protected. Furthermore, the full extent of security problems posed by enterprise IP Communications and new transport technologies (such as WiFi) are only now becoming known. The tight integration of packetized voice and video with various IP applications on an enterprise network suggests that existing hardware, such as gateways and IP-PBXs, could serve as a “backdoor” for attackers. Vendors are rising to the challenge with new kinds of hardware (application level gateways), VPNs and other forms of extensive encryption for point-to-point internal and external communications.