Kerio Routes PBX Calls to Smartphones

The Ten Commandments of BYOD

One of the more potentially troubling aspects of allowing people to use their own mobile phones at work is that it becomes a little more difficult for organizations to maintain control over the business relationship.

Once employees start using their own phones, they generally give out their own phone numbers. When that employee leaves, they still get calls from customers, which can be especially problematic if they go to work for a rival.

To help put some separation between employees and the business, Kerio Technologies has upgraded its IP PBX phone system to include support for a native softphone application, which allows calls to the office to be routed to a smartphone. James Gudeli, vice president of business development for Kerio, says that as far customers are concerned, the only phone number they ever see is the one used by the company, which can be reprogrammed at any given time.

Gudeli says that this approach works for employees as well, who are no longer burning up their valuable minutes for work purposes. In addition, employees can now access IP PBX applications, such as conferencing, via their smartphones.

Separately, Kerio has also enhanced the overall security of the environment with the introduction of Kerio Control 8, a unified threat management (UTM) security appliance that now includes IPSec virtual private network (VPN) support.

With the rise of the Bring Your Own Device (BYOD) phenomenon, the line between work and play has never been fuzzier. As organizations continue to struggle with the nuances of isolating the two in a way that allows them to maintain control over not only the customer relationship, but also the entire end-to-end business process, clearly more sophisticated approaches to IP PBX networking are going to be required.