9/20/2005 -- A new report from market watcher In-Stat confirms what many of you no doubt already know: Voice over Internet Protocol (VoIP) technologies add many desirable new features to business communication systems.

There’s a downside to VoIP desirability that you might not be aware of, however: Vendors and customers will almost certainly face security challenges as they try to realize these benefits, In-Stat researchers say.

For this reason, the market watcher projects that more than three-quarters of VoIP adopters will replace their security appliances within the next year.

This is good news, of a piece, for the security appliance market, which should record strong growth over the next few years, reaching $7 billion by 2009.

"Traditional firewall technologies can complicate several aspects of VoIP, most notably dynamic port trafficking and ... NAT transversal," says Victoria Fodale, an analyst with In-Stat. "Security product vendors are adding functions that address voice applications in their products, but, as history has shown, security typically lags behind advances in technology."

Elsewhere, In-Stat reports, larger, mid-sized companies of less than 1,000 employees are typically more concerned about VoIP security than their larger (or smaller, for that matter) peers.

And In-Stat isn’t simply shooting from the hip when it projects that security appliance growth will explode in the wake of VoIP: Among companies the market watcher surveyed, those that had deployed VoIP technologies had allocated significantly higher budgets for new security appliances than for VoIP have-nots.

Finally, adopters said reliability was the most important criteria for the purchase of new security appliance products. -Stephen Swoyer