Alan B. Johnston

Taking on webRTC in an enterprise

WebRTC, Web Real-Time Communications, will have a major impact on enterprise communications, as well as consumer communications and their interactions with enterprises. This article illustrates and discusses a number of issues that are specific to WebRTC enterprise usage. Some of these relate to security: firewall traversal, access control, and peer-to-peer data flows. Others relate to compliance: recording, logging, and enforcing enterprise policies. Additional enterprise considerations relate to integration and interoperation with existing communication infrastructure and session-centric telephony systems.

Enterprise WebRTC Powered by Browser Extensions

We use browser extensions to solve two important issues in adopting WebRTC (Web Real-Time Communications) in enterprises: how to integrate WebRTC-centric communication with existing systems such as corporate directories, communication infrastructure and intranet websites, and how to traverse media paths across enterprise firewalls. Vclick is a simple and easy to use web-based video collaboration application that enables click-to-call from other webpages. SecureEdge is a network border traversal system for policy and security enforcement, and consists of a secure media relay that sits at the network border or in the cloud. A browser extension in the enterprise users device transparently injects this media relay in every WebRTC media path needing to traverse the enterprise network edge to enable authenticated border traversal without help from the websites hosting the WebRTC pages. We attempt to generically support WebRTC in enterprises on a variety of application scenarios instead of creating another fragmented communication island. The challenges faced and techniques used in our proof-of-concepts are likely extensible to other enterprise WebRTC scenarios using the emerging HTML5 technologies.