What do you think “VOIPSA 2.0” should be? And perhaps more importantly, how are you willing to help?
As Dave Endler wrote in his post last week, five years ago the need for an organization like VOIPSA was very clear. As I’ve often said in my talks, at that time there were security vendors running around saying “VoIP is incredibly insecure… but if you buy our box/service/whatever you’ll be safe! Trust us!” And there were some communications vendors running around effectively saying “All those VoIP security concerns are overblown by paranoid security people… if you just buy our box/service/whatever you’ll be safe! Trust us!”
The truth, as we know, is somewhere in between.
And that is the prime value that VOIPSA brings, in my opinion… being an “industry neutral” place were we can lay out that there are very real threats to IP communications security – but that there are also very real solutions.
Over the past 5 years, we’ve started that process with the VoIP Security Threat Taxonomy, the VoiP Security Tools List, the VOIPSEC mailing list, this Voice of VOIPSA blog, the talks and webinars we’ve given, the Ingate SIP Trunking Seminars we’ve participated in, the Blue Box podcasts we created – and so many other ways.
There is a great bit more to do. The original need that spawned VOIPSA is very much alive today. If anything, the need is greater as we’ve moved from being concerned not just with “Voice Over IP”, but even more with the broader “Unified Communications” picture that includes video, chat, presence and other forms of collaboration. The threats, the tools and the solutions all keep evolving.
We all owe Dave Endler a great amount of thanks for all the work he did to bring us together, launch VOIPSA and get it moving. I certainly wish him all the best with his new endeavors and I expect we’ll still see him lurking around watching what’s going on.
Jonathan Zar and I will be posting some thoughts soon on next steps for the organization, but in the meantime I thought I’d just write this post and let you all know that I’d very much like to hear from you all who are reading this. While not formally a “membership” organization (i.e. you can’t become a “member” of VOIPSA), we do have a “community” of people who read and participate in the various mailing lists and other areas.
To all of you who have participated in and/or promoted VOIPSA (or have wanted to do so), what would you like to see the organization do next? How would you like to help?
Please feel free to leave a comment here or send me an email. I’m listening.
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