MiVoice Connect Edge Gateway
With MiVoice Connect, your company owns, maintains, and controls your business communications network. Its modular design distributes system intelligence across your entire network, ensuring superior reliability, ease of management and seamless connectivity —no matter how many locations and remote workers you have across the world.
Benefits
- Consistent user experience for your office-based and remote employees
- Removes the complexity of securing remote endpoints, including the elimination of a VPN requirement
- Improved voice quality via RAST protocol
Solving Remote Worker Challenges
When it comes to remote employees, security is a top concern. Home or remote working environments can be more of a threat, and therefore, require VPNs, firewalls, and anti-virus programs to protect a company’s sensitive data. With the Edge Gateway, you can eliminate VPNs and third-party programs. It provides seamless and secure connectivity to your remote employees so they can benefit from the same, secure MiVoice Connect experience as your office workers.
Seamless User Experience
The Edge Gateway is fully integrated with endpoints and features of MiVoice Connect. Your remote employees will have full access to all unified communications capabilities – conferencing, collaboration, instant messaging, Outlook integration, call management, and softphone are all available, with the same experience no matter where you’re located.
RAST for Improved Voice Quality
By establishing a RAST tunnel to the Edge Gateway, IP400 series phones can provide the exact same functionality as if they were inside the corporate network. This protocol uses an encrypted tunnel that employs UDP to transport media packets to improve voice quality in less-than-ideal Internet conditions. This protocol falls back to TCP for media transport if UDP fails. TCP is used for signaling traffic.
Secure Endpoints
All traffic to and from the Edge Gateway is encrypted and combined with secure access to MiVoice Connect endpoints to provide you with peace of mind. The MiVoice Connect client links to both the reverse proxy and TURN servers in the Edge Gateway to offer a seamless remote experience. Reverse proxies, the intermediate proxy servers, provide internal server resources to requesting clients outside the corporate network. Outside clients interact with the proxy server as if it were the requested server and thus have no contact with the actual server providing the resources. Plus, none of the Edge Gateway-supported endpoints require the installation of a VPN client to work effectively and securely across your company’s private network.
WebRTC Support
WebRTC supports browser-based apps for media communications and file sharing. The Edge Gateway implements WebRTC, with the MiVoice Connect web collaboration app utilizing WebRTC for real-time communications with a compatible web browser.
Deployment & Licensing
WebRTC supports browser-based apps for media communications and file sharing. The Edge Gateway implements WebRTC, with the MiVoice Connect web collaboration app utilizing WebRTC for real-time communications with a compatible web browser.
The Edge Gateway is deployed in your DMZ, behind the external firewall and has two interfaces – one internal and one external. The internal one has one IP address whereas the external one has three IP addresses, one for each: RAST, Reverse Proxy, and TURN server. These three addresses must have same network mask and gateway. If you are a MiVoice Connect customer that has already deployed a Mitel Collaboration Service Appliance in your DMZ, you do not need to move the service appliance. Just add an Edge Gateway next to it in parallel. If you are new to MiVoice Connect, the Edge Gateway should go in the DMZ and the service appliance should go behind it in the corporate network.
To manage your Edge Gateway, you can easily do so through the MiVoice Connect Director. For advanced troubleshooting, the Connect Director can pass through to the Edge Gateway admin portal. The Edge Gateway itself is a free add-on to your company’s MiVoice Connect solution. You can run reverse proxies and use Connect apps remotely without purchasing any licenses. Licenses are required when you want to use softphones or desk phones remotely. However, licenses are included with MiVoice Connect Premier and Elite bundles. You can also buy remote media licenses a la carte. These are useful when you want to support guest users of the MiVoice Connect web collaboration app.
