Enabling a Live Video Experience That’s Powerful and Secure

The most exciting part about Communications Platform as a Service (CPaaS) is that it caters to a variety of use cases—from social video apps, eLearning, and telehealth platforms, webinars or a disruptive new way of using video to serve a need that we haven’t foreseen yet.

Vonage Video API customers are pioneers in their respective verticals. They are using live video to build powerful and engaging experiences in schools, hospitals, and banks. Many of these environments have highly restrictive networks and stringent security requirements that pose challenges that are hard to meet for a multi-tenant cloud provider. We have been working closely with these customers to better understand their requirements and finding innovative ways to serve them.

InTouch Health

One of these customers who was looking to engage with us for a live video offering was InTouch Health. InTouch Health is a global, cloud-based telehealth and telecommunications network that delivers high-quality clinical care to patients at any time, from anywhere.

With a wide variety of clinically designed telehealth devices, products, and services, they offer care services to health systems at a reduced cost and at scale—which assists them in deploying telehealth programs quickly and seamlessly.

The healthcare industry is known for its restrictive networks. The security of patient data, records and internal information is paramount for any hospital or healthcare provider.

Realizing that to continue with the company’s growth trajectory and vision, InTouch Health needed to augment their existing technologies to enable next generation multiparty telehealth within a web-based user experience through WebRTC.

Implementing Live Video in Tightly Controlled Networks with IP Whitelisting

Some of our customers need to know IP addresses of Vonage servers that will be used to serve a request in order to open up specific ports in a firewall. This is either due to their own IT requirements or a requirement enforced on them by their customers. In the case of InTouch Health, it is the hospitals they work with that impose these restrictions. IP Whitelisting enables live video in tightly controlled networks by limiting exposure of these networks to a select set of IP addresses. This further allows InTouch Health to be compliant with healthcare industry regulations.

“TokBox [now the Vonage Video API] provides the security capabilities, including HIPAA compliance, and features we’re looking for to enable our health system customers to virtualize care across their enterprises through a single platform,”  noted InTouch Health founder, chairman, and chief innovation officer Yulun Wang, PhD.

Supporting Flexible Connectivity with Configurable TURN

Working with tightly controlled networks requires limiting exposure to only trusted entities and often requires firewall configuration to allow media to pass through.

To establish a secure connection in these environments, customers rely on Vonage's Configurable TURN API. This gives them the flexibility and control to use their own TURN servers for media traffic and connect to the Vonage Video API service from restrictive networks. Configurable TURN is particularly useful for healthcare services, who work with restrictive environments, such as hospitals. 

To learn more about the Configurable TURN API, please contact us. 

Providing the Highest Level of Bit Encryption with AES-256

The Advanced Encryption Standard, or AES, is a symmetric block cipher chosen by the U.S. government to protect classified information. It’s implemented in software and hardware throughout the world to encrypt sensitive data.

At Vonage, we’ve just rolled out support for AES-256—the highest level of bit encryption. This was crucial to many of our customers, ensuring they have the highest level of encryption to keep sensitive customer data secure.

Fun fact: 256 refers to the key size. The larger the size, the more possible keys there are. To understand the magnitude of the effort it would take to try all possible combination keys, 256-bit encryption offers more combination possibilities than there are stars in the universe (a septillion stars), and would take more years by billions of computers to crack than the age of the universe (13.8 billion years).