Video Conferencing Are Your Information secure?

Video Conferencing – Are Your Information secure? by Moneydoctor

The purpose of web or video conferences is to save time, money and effort, which are usually expended in flying across continents to discuss issues. Such everyday issues and information sharing which is necessary for the smooth running of businesses can easily be taken care of through conference calls. However, keeping this information secure and out of the hands of mischief-makers is very important. That is why precautions for the safekeeping of this information are necessary.

As the IT administrator of a company, the duty to keep such video conferences free from external interferences falls in your lap. So the first step should be securing the web conference internally. For each particular conference, the participants involved should be given user ID’s and passwords to enter the meeting. To register their names, they must have a secret code provided to them. The power of changing passwords should rest with only a few top- notch IT people.

Secondly, firewalls should be established to stop hackers from joining the party. Use servers hosted in the DMZ zone, if the concerned web- meeting falls in the important category. Tell participants not to give out meeting details to others through their yahoo, hotmail or g-mail accounts etc. These are easily hacked. All the firewalls you establish for your own IT network will be of no avail if participants are tossing around the details of the web-conference meeting on the internet.

Even while transmission of information during a meeting; hackers can use parallel equipment to peek on the messages passing to and fro. To avoid this, the least you must do is use SSL with your computer. Other than that, many other sophisticated devices are available to monitor the traffic. If a third party is involved in providing the conference call services, you must double check on their security measures.

Best would be to employ hosted web-conferencing models like WebEx or Microsoft's LiveMeeting. The plus point of using hosted models is that these help in keeping information inside the company’s IT network. The drawback is that they are an expensive option for smaller companies. So if you are an upcoming business you might think of using Lotus notes.

Remember that no matter how effective you think your firewalls are, they can still be broken through by smarter minds. So it should be made a cardinal rule that no classified information will ever be shared or transferred in a web conference meeting. It’s better to use the company’s money in this instance to fly and meet others rather than risk exposing the information on the web. Remember that information security during web conferencing depends on how further you can think than a potential hacker

Author is telecom consultant to several large telecom companies across the world. His area of specialization is VoIP & network security. You can get various interesting articles, free reports, free email course on converged communication and data security on his website conference call services .

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