SIP Trunking Case Study

A large global financial institution wanted to use a carrier’s Multi-Protocol Label Switching (MPLS) service to interconnect IP PBXes across hundreds of geographically disperse sites. Although MPLS provided logical separation between different customers’ traffic, the customer wanted security and control that would:

  - Prevent service theft

  - Stop intrusions and attacks

  - Prevent unauthorized access

  - Protect calls from eavesdropping and interception

  - Ensure the confidentiality and the integrity of all transmitted information

  - Immediately notify them of any out-of-band activity

  - Dynamically control out-of-band activity (e.g. fork, terminate, etc.)

After examining their security and regulatory requirements and projecting where the company wanted to take real-time communications (mobility, fixed/mobile convergence, presence, etc.) IPSec VPNs were deemed too limiting, so the carrier suggested an Eclipse solution.

The customer deployed Eclipse appliances at the access-edge of every IP PBX to ensure the security of all SIP signaling and media traffic as it crosses the carrier backbone (Figure below). To see all of the Eclipse security features click here.

But Eclipse goes beyond security and this customer leveraged Eclipse to ensure their real-time communications met their performance, reliability and quality requirements.

• At high-volume sites, Eclipse's clustering capabilities provide load balancing for consistent performance, and redundancy for high availability.
• Between sites, automatic IP rerouting maintains the availability of VoIP trunks through most wide-area network failures.
• If the central site becomes unreachable or VoIP service fails, Eclipse provides local call completion within remote sites and diverts external calls to the PSTN.
• Policy-based monitoring and control of both signaling and media traffic further enhance VoIP reliability.
• Central QoS monitoring, service-level agreement (SLA) verification, and other management tools give network operators the information they need to maintain network availability and performance.
• Central provisioning and upgrade tools let operators configure and maintain remote devices without costly travel to distant sites.