“The ETM^® Performance Manager provides real-time visibility of Symantec telephone trunks directly at my desktop. If one of my trunks goes down, I immediately receive an email and pager alert from the Performance Manager Console. There is nothing else on the market that gives me this level of visibility.”

— Neil Kole, Director of Worldwide Communications, Symantec Corporation

PROBLEM
Symantec was interested in obtaining real-time, enterprise-wide visibility and control of their voice network. They sought a platform capable of providing real-time visibility of call activity, network performance data and resource usage metrics with consolidated reporting—independent of vendor or implementation. Symantec also wanted to eliminate unauthorized access to their voice and data network through vulnerabilities such as modems.

SOLUTION
The ETM® System demonstrated its capability to manage and secure the telecommunications network of a geographically distributed enterprise when it was deployed as part of a 90-day Telewatch Secure^SM Assessment Service to monitor and control several of Symantec’s analog, T1, and PRI spans at their headquarters in Cupertino, California, and their call center in Eugene, Oregon. Since August 2001, Symantec has incrementally deployed the ETM System on spans in all of their North American (U.S. and Canadian) and on select European sites.

BENEFITS
When Symantec’s Communications Manager pulls up her ETM System’s Performance Manager each morning she receives a real-time, centralized, enterprise-wide view of the status of Symantec’s telecom resources. The health and status of Symantec’s entire telecommunications network is of prime interest, particularly the smaller sites that don’t have their own telecom personnel. She can monitor telecom signaling error and availability conditions for the entire enterprise, and automatically receives email and pager alerts when an issue occurs. With the ETM System diagnostic tools, she diagnoses and troubleshoots common span/trunk faults and determines whether the problem is on site or in the Central Office (CO). She no longer needs to send a subcontractor to a problem site to check out what she can now quickly determine on her own.

The ETM Voice Firewall implements Symantec’s granular, administrator-defined security policies to prevent abusive or malicious use of their telecom resources by both internal and external callers. Specific policies terminating inbound calls to, and outbound calls from all unauthorized modems eliminate the risk of an attacker finding non-secure modems, as well as the risk of employees installing modems on their phone lines to circumvent the data firewall’s filters.

Symantec actively uses the ETM Usage Manager’s report generation capabilities, routinely creating scheduled reports to be automatically generated and delivered to designated recipients via email, or designated locations on the corporate data network or web server. A wide range of reports are generated, from performance reports (e.g., trunk resource utilization, average or peak call activity, trunk health-and-status, and central office error conditions), to cost allocation and bill verification reports, to security and forensic reports (e.g., detailed analysis of suspicious modem or fax activities, potential toll fraud, or service abuse).