Last week our only1 telco, Telkom, came to give our IT dept. a variety of talks. One such talk was to show off the VoIP implementations they have started using at some campuses.
The went for a full CISCO implementation. During the talk the lecturer mentioned that CISCO hardware is far easier to maintain and doesn't run on Windows, and is thus, more secure. Just before the talk I had seen this.
I pointed out that there were still security vulnerabilities that needed to be dealt with, made worse by the increase in the number of devices (patched your phone today?), and asked how they have managed patching within deployment. He said you would need to purchase CiscoWorks for centralised patch management, otherwise patching is a tedious process and they usually deploy an engineer on-site.
It is always nice to have a real world example. It seems patching was not a priority to their team. I also got the feeling they only patch their servers. CISCO has the tools, but this just shows how low a priority patching is to many people.
As a side note, the vast expense of the CISCO solution makes an Asterisk based solution far more attractive.
1They aren't technically a monopoly anymore but reality and theory do not match in this case.
I pointed out that there were still security vulnerabilities that needed to be dealt with, made worse by the increase in the number of devices (patched your phone today?), and asked how they have managed patching within deployment. He said you would need to purchase CiscoWorks for centralised patch management, otherwise patching is a tedious process and they usually deploy an engineer on-site.
It is always nice to have a real world example. It seems patching was not a priority to their team. I also got the feeling they only patch their servers. CISCO has the tools, but this just shows how low a priority patching is to many people.
As a side note, the vast expense of the CISCO solution makes an Asterisk based solution far more attractive.
1They aren't technically a monopoly anymore but reality and theory do not match in this case.
There has been a lot of noise about this issue and I am not going to repeat what has been said. Instead here is a pointer to a good summary of links, Schneier’s take and JOAT’s disclosure point. Cisco did bad. UPDATE: A great interview. Peo
Tracked: Aug 03, 16:32