In the Business Intro to WebRTC session at the WebRTC Conference & Expo, attendees heard about a range of topics, from how WebRTC will change the world and the ways different enterprise departments can utilize WebRTC all the way to the realistic expectations of WebRTC and security considerations.
Brent Kelly, president and principal analyst at KelCor, presented on the “adult thinking” with respect to WebRTC; offering practical thoughts from the enterprise market. In terms of the hype cycle, WebRTC is somewhere between the technology trigger and the peak of inflated expectations – it’s still early days, basically.
Kelly gave a three-fold approach to deciding whether or not you should adopt a technology, including WebRTC. This approach is based the technology’s impact on business drivers: where you make your money, what your company does the best and what your company is passionate about. If the technology is not impacting your drivers, why would you deploy it? The other consideration is it your competitors are all doing it – then you should adopt to maintain parity.
He left the audience with a comparison of WebRTC to HTML – people don’t usually think about the market size for HTML. It’s what people do with the technology that will generate its value.
Kelly was followed by John Burke, principal research analyst with Nemertes Research, who covered big data and security related to WebRTC. In a world full of endpoints and access to so much data, enterprises are shifting their decisions to become more information –driven. They want comprehensive visibility over the whos, whats, whens, wheres and hows of their business processes. This desire is going to drive a rapid evolution in the WebRTC toolset. Organizations need to consider what the impact on infrastructure these tools will have, and whether they have enough bandwidth and capacity on devices to handle these tools and networks demands.
When it comes to security and WebRTC – there are a lot of different factors that organizations may not have thought about yet. For example, organizations need to think about security beyond the communications channel; it’s not just about breaking into systems. WebRTC opens the door for more spam, as WebRTC clients are open to unsolicited connection requests.
The hype around WebRTC is all about opening things wide, but as organizations are going to need to start introducing authentication, that openness gets restricted. Who can call who becomes a smaller group.
There’s also the issue of compliance. Burke said he’s surprised he hasn’t heard much discussion about CALEA, or the Communications Assistants for Law Enforcement Agencies, which means organizations need to be able to provide information to the FBI if they come knocking. The question starts to turn to figuring out who is responsible for producing that information, and does it cover information going through your website instead of a traditional PBX? In three to five years, Burke believes the answer will be whoever runs the Web servers.
The peer-to-peer aspect of WebRTC opens threats like eavesdropping and DDoS attacks. It becomes harder to sort out bad traffic from real traffic, and organizations might start to see accidental DDoS attacks as more endpoints will be able to generate traffic. High-bandwidth and demanding traffic streams are going to become more common, so organizations need to be prepared at the router and Internet link level to avoid accidental DDoS.
Besides these factors, WebRTC is as secure as your browser or as secure as general enterprise in-house app development. But are you reassured by that?
“These are complications you need to think about if you’re deploying WebRTC for enterprise purposes,” he said.
The event continues this week with more sessions like this one. Check out the agenda for the rest of the week on the WebRTC Conference & Expo website.
Edited by
Cassandra Tucker
