Nowadays, typing ‘IP phone’ into Google will present you with sponsored links and targeted advertising, which makes it difficult to choose the right IP phone.

As no two service providers have the same offerings, we’ve explored the best VoIP phone systems for your small business. This enables you to get a full understanding of the different IP phone systems available. With setup easier than ever, and significant cost savings to be made, every business should embrace modern IP telephone technology.

Benefits of using VoIP phones for a small business include:

Cost savings: This is a key benefit for businesses of all sizes, as an IP telephone is more cost-effective than a conventional phone. Since IP telephony connects calls over the internet, businesses using IP phones save money on long distance calls. For businesses who make overseas calls, additional savings are made. For small and mid-sized businesses, savings can be around 50%.

Setup time: As a small business operating in unprecedented times, downtime is not an option. Installation is quick and within a few hours, your system can be up and running.

Remote working: The COVID-19 pandemic demonstrated that companies need to be flexible. In the era of remote working, cloud-based tools are crucial for internal and customer-facing business processes. IP technology enables you to easily port a phone number to a new location, as phone numbers are not tied to specific devices. IP phones are simple to use and training for employees is quick and minimal.

Integration: The best VoIP services allow easy integration with existing software and third-party providers.

Source: TechRadar

The Qualys Research Team has discovered a whopping 21 bugs in the popular mail transfer agent (MTA), which was built to send and receive email on major Unix-like operating systems. It comes pre-installed on Linux distributions such as Debian, for instance.

“Exim Mail Servers are used so widely and handle such a large volume of the internet’s traffic that they are often a key target for hackers,” Jogi said, noting that last year, a vulnerability in Exim was a target of the Russian advanced persistent threat (APT) known as Sandworm.

He added, “The 21 vulnerabilities we found are critical as attackers can remotely exploit them to gain complete root privileges on an Exim system – allowing compromises such as a remote attacker gaining full root privileges on the target server and executing commands to install programs, modify data, create new accounts and change sensitive settings on the mail servers. It’s imperative that users apply patches immediately.”

Qualys researchers wrote and tested the patches, Jogi told Threatpost; and the “official” patches from Exim are modified versions of those (those interested can review both for reference and comparison). Exim provided packagers and maintainers (including distros@openwall) with access to its security Git repository for updates.

Source: Threat Post

That’s because most enterprises have a centralized security function, with security hardware running in the data center guarding the perimeter of the corporate network and monitoring the traffic flowing in and out of it. And that’s fine for organizations that are largely centralized, with users accessing data and applications over the corporate WAN. They may have branch offices, but these will either consume security services offered by the data center, or they may have their own branch office security appliance as well.

And that’s not to mention the huge number of people who are now working remotely due to the coronavirus pandemic, and who may continue to do so indefinitely. Many of these people may be accessing cloud applications most of the time, but even so they have to connect to their organization’s data center via a VPN before their traffic can get to the cloud services they want to access.

However, the proportion of traffic from branch offices which is ultimately destined for the internet rather than the corporate data center has increased from 20% to over 80%, according to Juniper Networks. So sending it to the data center first, to go through a security stack, is definitely suboptimal for a number of reasons:

• This results in a huge amount of traffic moving over the WAN between branch offices and the data center when it could otherwise go straight out onto the internet from branch offices. This has an impact on WAN bandwidth costs.
• Some traffic, such as Office 365 data, does not need to go through the full security stack, so sending it over the WAN is a waste of resources.
• Sending data to a centralized security function can have a significant impact on performance, both of the WAN, but also of cloud applications.

Source: Enterprise Networking Planet