Businesses today are facing unique communication challenges. The
workplace is a dynamicand constantly changing environment. Along
with rapidly evolving product lines, workteams are becoming more
dispersed due to factors such as globalization,
increasedcompetition, and pricing pressures. As a result, the DNA
of today's workforce issubstantially different. There is an
increasing need for traditional workers as well as forremote
employees and work teams to stay connected and able to communicate
regardlessof location, device, or network.
The perception of videoconferencing has received some of its
initial negative sentimentsfrom experiences of older technology.
While traditional videoconferencing was as good asthe technology of
the time would allow, there are new advancements available to
providea higher quality visual and audio experience. Even though
videoconferencing has beenadopted by many organizations over the
last 20 years, it has still not hit critical mass. Much of the
responsibility for the slow rate of adoption has been high
expectations andlow results.
Frost & Sullivan has seen a significant paradigm shift in
the videoconferencing market. Since 2004, growth in this market has
been steadily increasing for a number of reasons.Much of this
revival is attributed to the increasing availability of capital
expenditure dueto stable economic growth. Globalization and the
need for dispersed workgroups tocollaborate continues to increase
and with it, the interest in videoconferencing hasincreased.
Another important driver for this market is the move to an IP
basedinfrastructure and the success of technologies like Voice Over
IP (VOIP). Asvideoconferencing vendors prove the ease of
integrating their technology into thecorporate infrastructure,
videoconferencing will become a much more interesting
businesscommunication tool.
Frost & Sullivan has also seen videoconferencing fall into
the same trap as other marketssuch as Supervisory Control And Data
Acquisition (SCADA) systems and financialnetworks. When a
technology is deployed on a dedicated network connection
withlimited accessibility, there is little concern for security.
The technology is inherentlysecure because of its deployment. As
seen in technologies like VOIP, there is a new set ofsecurity
challenges once technology moves out onto the same infrastructure
as all theother data devices and is visible to the global
Internet.This paper will discuss many of the challenges that
videoconferencing technology faces inregards creating easy-to-use,
secure IP videoconferencing. Each challenge will bedescribed in
detail, and various methods of solving each challenge will also be
presented.