nfon AG is an ITSP, providing hosted PBX (News - Alert) services to the corporate market in Germany and in other European countries. The company’s value, its officials said, lies in its ability to offer cost-effective telephony services to its customer base.

The company takes complete responsibility for the delivery of both internal and external phone services, “which means,” said nfon officials, that their users “avoid both the capital costs of installing their own PBX and the overhead of managing that system. The hosted PBX option is particularly attractive for any geographically distributed organization such as retail and the banking sector.”

A hosted PBX service provided by nfon handles all internal and external communications. As this includes communication with customers and suppliers and interoffice calls, they may run over the public Internet, which is a concern to many of nfon’s customers, particularly those handling information which is subject to regulatory and privacy controls are demanding call encryption.

But as necessary as it was, adding call encryption to its existing systems while maintaining their cost advantages proved a challenge for nfon. So they turned to UM Labs.

The UM Labs SIP Security Controller provides standards based call encryption which allows nfon to offer this service to their customer base without the need to install additional equipment at the customer’s premises. All a customer needs is a handset capable of supporting the same encryption standards.

The UM Labs SIP Security controller provides encryption for SIP signaling (call setup) and RTP media. SIP signaling is protected with TLS, while RTP is encrypted using Secure RTP (SRTP).

Nfon’s back-end provisioning service means that call encryption can quickly be enabled at the customer’s request. The UM Labs gateway installed at the nfon hosting centre will automatically set up encryption for all calls between the customer’s handsets and the hosted PBX.

This means that if the user’s handsets are capable of supporting encryption, encrypted calls can be enabled as required without visiting the customer’s premises. Once the service is enabled, users benefit from encryption on all calls made between office locations and on all calls routed via nfon’s PSTN gateway.

In September, TMC (News - Alert) reported that German IT services provider Noris Network announced an alliance with nfon to offer VoIP communications for customers. Under the terms of the agreement, Noris has taken over hosting and security for the nfon server cluster and can now offer customers connection to the nfon VoIP system.