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Voice - the last unsecured data service
Simon Bransfield-Garth, CEO of Cellcrypt, suggests that voice security on your favourite mobile phone has been difficult but that help is on hand for people who want to keep their conversations private - even President Obama
We all know about the need to secure data in the increasingly disparate enterprise and virtual world, particularly when it is accessible outside the office from laptops and mobile devices.
With frequent high profile data loss headlines, organisations are increasingly turning to Virtual Private Networks (VPNs) to protect data in transit and endpoint data encryption to prevent sensitive information from being read if devices are lost or stolen.
But there is another data service which so far has gone largely ignored – voice communications. You might think that voice is not a data service but voice has been digitised since the advent of 2G networks in the early '90s and increasingly voice is carried as using Voice over IP (VoIP) via the Internet. And of course, confidential information is communicated at least as much in standard telephone calls as it is in written documents.
This is not just commercially important information like contract negotiations and matters relating to intellectual property but may also be information relating to matters of national security or personal safety, particularly when operating in high risk zones such as places with higher than normal incidence of kidnapping or piracy.
So we need to think about how we protect mobile voice information as well as text and graphic based data, to guard against financial loss and as a measure to further protect the safety of personnel.
Secure voice calling has traditionally been the domain of military and senior government figures. Large, expensive and difficult to use, the technology is primarily used where it is enforced or the circumstances demand special measures. Many of the currently available products still use only 2G mobile technology (Circuit Switched Data); and so struggle to provide the sort of service quality that today's mobile phone users take for granted. This gap between the current market products and the expectations of ordinary users was clearly demonstrated in January in the widely publicised discussion over whether President Obama would have to give up his much cherished BlackBerry smartphone in favour of a government approved device.
Fortunately for President Obama and the rest of us, technology is coming to the rescue. The next generation of encryption technology is allowing standard mobile phones to add software that encrypts voice communications, delivering military grade voice calling security in a standard business package. Being a software solution, the user is able to continue to use all the existing features of the mobile phone such as email and web browsing and also keep all their private data such as contacts. It also means that the training time for users is minimal.
The service can be added without the need to invest in expensive new infrastructure or rolling out new phones to users. In effect, it operates as a "virtual secure phone network", delivered in software on top of an existing corporate phone infrastructure. The technology is initially available for a range of mobile phones with the ability to extend it to standard landlines on corporate PBXs.
And now for Blackberry users, Cellcrypt has recently launched Cellcrypt Mobile for BlackBerry. This is the first time secure voice encryption solutions have been available for this popular standard business phone and is finding a home in government as well as more traditional industries including finance, oil exploration, drug discovery and senior management where privacy of phone conversations, particularly when travelling, is a high priority.
Cellcrypt technology also supports Nokia smartphones and Windows Mobile devices and offers a high level of voice quality, low latency and international coverage across all mainstream mobile (GPRS, EDGE, 3G, EV-DO, HSPA) and WiFi networks.
So, next time you are planning your security policies, perhaps you should also consider mobile voice – and plug the last unsecured data gap in the enterprise.
www.cellcrypt.com
