SkypeShield launched a new Federation Ethical Wall solution, which offers granular control over federation to address security and data protection when federating with external companies.

Enabling federation raises serious business and security issues that need to be addressed by applying granular policy rules defining permitted operations between communicating parties.

Companies wanting to extend communication outside the company boundaries require protection and control over the different flows of data offered by Skype for Business.

Federation raises also privacy issues related to reviling personal and executive users details including availability (online/away), mobile phone number and location.

In order to meet security threats, while using Skype for Business, organizations need to be able to allow federation from a specific company only to specific internal users or groups.

The federation Ethical Wall offers the following features:

• Defines granular policy rule based on a user/group communicating with a specific company (SIP domain)
• Specific modality policy control: IM, audio, video, conference (meeting), desktop sharing, file transfer
• Blocks presence information from external users depending on policy
• Blocks external user from initiating an IM conversation while still allowing internal user to initiate and communicate with external user
• Allows user some local policy management by applying different policies based on inclusion in a user’s contact list. This way, by adding the federated user to the internal user’s contact list, the policy will allow more federation such as presence information
• Enforces policy in the DMZ and blocks non-approved traffic from entering the network