3/25/2008 -- For a long time now, Voice-over-IP (VoIP) has been an up-and-comer. But now that it's finally seeing widespread adoption, many enterprises are being caught with their trousers down.

In fact, industry watchers say, a sizeable percentage of U.S. businesses haven't taken steps to secure their VoIP systems.

And as businesses continue to expand their IP telephony deployments to locations beyond the LAN, securing their VoIP infrastructures will become increasingly important, according to market watcher In-Stat.

"According to an In-Stat survey of U.S. businesses, no mechanisms for securing VoIP had more than 50 percent penetration across all sizes of business," said In-Stat analyst Victoria Fodale. "Proactive measures, including periodic security audits and pre-deployment assessments had low percentages of penetration too, even among the larger organizations."

VoIP has certainly arrived. More than 80 percent of survey respondents have deployed some type of VoIP solution in their companies, according to In-Stat.

Moreover, VoIP should continue to surge. Between 2007 and 2010, In-Stat projected, 168 million IP PBX lines will be shipped into the business premises. --Stephen Swoyer