Role of Managed Services Environment

Role of Managed Services Environment

In a managed service offering, often the service provider delivers an MPLS (Multi-Protocol Label Switching)
interface and delivers a private address space into the organization from their network.

We discussed managed SIP trunk service offerings, what they were and their advantages. Now we’ll drill down even further and look at why Ingate is an important part of these deployments to normalize SIP traffic, maintain network security and bridge the voice and data LANs for more effective use of SIP in the enterprise.

In a managed service offering, often the service provider delivers an MPLS (Multi-Protocol Label Switching) interface and delivers a private address space into the organization from their network. This resolves the NAT traversal issues. However, it does not solve SIP normalization issues between the IP-PBX and ITSP. It also doesn’t address security. Despite the actual delivery mechanism of the SIP trunks, the Ingate unit is still required to normalize the traffic between the business and the service provider when those two implementations are not identical.

From a security point of view, since the service provider is offering the Local Area Network and the private IP addresses from their network space, business must ask themselves: Do I trust the service provider to protect my IP-PBX and other parts of my network from harm? If the answer is not a definitive “yes” then the company will be well advised to install an Ingate SIParator or Firewall to perform this very important function.

Finally, by delivering service this way, the service provider is in effect creating separate voice and data networks in the customer premise. This means that personal computers are not going to be connected to the same LAN segment and cannot be used for such services as Presence and Instant Messaging, soft clients cannot be used and the PC cannot be used to self-configure user accounts. In these instances, the Ingate can act as a bridge between the two networks allowing the full capabilities of SIP to be realized, including the promise of Business VoIP.