H323 Remote Phones 2

[twitchy087]

Hey Guys,

I know that there has been a lot of discussion about this but I was looking for a black and white answer. Is it universally said to be a great security risk to the IPO if you are using remote H323 phones, even if you are sitting behind a firewall with port forwards in place? Obviously it is a great concern if the system is public facing but do the necessary ports for H323 phones present a security concern? I ask because we have a customer with upward of 80 VPN phones deployed and as you are aware, it is a rather large headache dealing with them on such a large scale. These things just dont work well on the public residential email, at least on a consistent basis. I was hoping that deploying H323 would be a much better option considering they have less overhead...

Thanks

 

[IPGuru]

Point 1 Security
if the router & IpO is correcty configured - only necessary ports, secure passwords on ALL useres (even thse not being used remotly) then the ris is probably minimal

Point 2 using H323 instead of VPN for 80+ users
H323 for 80 + phones would be a far bigger nightmare than mamnaging a sensible VPN solution
add to the mi that not all ISP's play nicely with H323 remote phones & I would strongly advise againts it.
VPN handsets are far more robust that the h323 variety



Do things on the cheap & it will cost you dear

 

[twitchy087]

I appreciate the input. I may consider using a mixture of the two. For those locations where the VPN phone is not reliable, I may pop an H323 phone out there to see how that works.