EPA Leads Government’s Shift to Softphones

Softphones Improve Patching and Remote UX

Softphones bring other advantages: First, agencies aren’t required to purchase new equipment or hardware that may see little use, such as desktop phones. Second, IT teams can readily patch softphones to resolve cybersecurity vulnerabilities faster than VoIP technology allows. The natural wear and tear inherent in VoIP technology also requires desk phones to be replaced as they age. Parts in the phones at some agencies may now be more than 10 or 15 years old. Perhaps most important, leaders like McNeill say the change improves support for a truly hybrid workforce. Her manager, EPA CIO Vaughn Noga, has said workers should enjoy the same IT experience whether they work at home or in the office.

“The broader picture is, you can be remote,” McNeill says of the transition. “We have a lot of criminal investigative division agents who are in the field. They can have that phone in the field. We have a lot of lab workers who are away from their desks. You can be in the coffee shop and get a call. Work is what you do, not where you are, and you’re no longer necessarily tied to that desk.”

EPA employees have welcomed the change.

“They are really excited about it,” McNeill says. “They want to get rid of that hardware on their desk, and they are excited about picking up that laptop and going anywhere while still being able to make and answer phone calls, wherever they are.”

Softphones generally offer instant messaging, call forwarding and other capabilities more traditionally tied to desk phones.

Avaya, a cloud-based communications company, is building out the EPA’s cloud infrastructure with AT&T and tested the new setup over the summer. When the system is finished, the software will be pushed to employees’ laptops, and their existing telephone numbers will be ported to activate their lines. The project should wrap up by the end of 2024, McNeill says.

NARA’s Switch to Softphones Brings Better Customer Service

Such changes in government technology are part of a broader evolution of the modern workplace, spurred by the COVID-19 pandemic and growing demands for greater workplace flexibility.

According to “Unified communications in the public sector of the future,” a report from cloud-based communications provider RingCentral, “Long-term working practices will have to change in light of the recent pandemic, with conventional office layouts replaced by open-air seating, smaller hub spaces, off-site working, and collaboration at distance. Unified communications is the perfect enabler for these new ways of working because it decouples the employee from a fixed workstation while aiding closer collaboration and teamwork.”

At the National Archives and Records Administration, a similar transition is underway.

Twelve of the organization’s 40 offices have completed the move to softphones, and CIO Sheena Burrell expects the transition to be complete by fall. That means about 3,500 employees will soon use softphones — including those in the organization’s underground human-made storage sites — through a Cisco Webex application on their laptops before the end of the year.

The technology makes it easier for IT workers to make adjustments such as tweaking a phone tree or adding a line for new employees as they onboard, Burrell says. Previously, NARA used a private branch exchange system, commonly known as a PBX — a private telephone network that allows users to communicate within an organization or externally using VoIP, the Integrated Services Digital Network protocol or analog signals.

The transition also allows NARA employees to more easily record phone calls to ensure better service or add customer satisfaction surveys and other improvements, Burrell says.

Each of those subtle improvements add up to a solution that makes it easier for employees to help citizens, she says: “What you really don’t want is this dramatic change, where employees must undergo a lot of change management just to be able to make a telephone call.”

The agency has a few exceptions for landlines: Shared rooms and break rooms within NARA’s offices will continue to host VoIP phones, and blue-light emergency phones in parking garages operate on analog lines to ensure uninterrupted service during an outage.

As they do at the EPA, workplace operations at NARA continue to change. Burrell doesn’t recall receiving anything other than cold sales calls to her desk phone after returning to the office. Many coworkers send instant messages or arrange video chats using NARA’s Google Workspace suite when they want to connect, she says.

“Most people say, ‘Hey, can I set up a quick video chat?’” she says. “I use the phone significantly less and make many more video calls.”

Nearly 40 percent of government-based respondents to IDC’s March 2022 Hybrid Work Maturity Study said their organization was in the process of redesigning policies, culture, technology and facilities to accommodate a hybrid workforce.

An additional 18 percent noted that their employees enjoyed consistently seamless experiences interacting with resources or colleagues across locations; only 6 percent said they did not expect a significant portion of their employees to work remotely.

None of the initiatives would be possible without the changes to support hybrid work — and funding for IT infrastructure — that stemmed from the pandemic.

“We had to learn a lot of things quickly,” McNeill says. “We didn’t have the whole Microsoft suite of tools to be able to work. We didn’t have the network bandwidth to ensure that people were able to work efficiently. We asked, ‘What is the art of the possible?’ And when we returned to the office, ‘Do we need this equipment? How can we work smarter, better and more efficiently?’”

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How Agencies Should Ensure Softphone Security

As more federal agencies adopt softphones and other unified communications tools, the National Security Agency has suggested best practices to maintain security.

The agency warned in a June 2021 document that the use of softphones creates a single point of failure for communications, meaning that if PCs go down and email service is interrupted, phone service would go out as well. The document included several tips to help IT leaders bolster security:

• Segment the network: Use virtual LANs to segment voice and video traffic from data traffic and use separate IP address ranges to limit access for certain sets of devices.
• Update and patch software: Before deploying new versions of software, vet the update on a test network to ensure unexpected problems won’t arise as a result of the update. Once the test is complete, apply the patch to the network immediately.
• Authenticate, authenticate, authenticate: “Mutual authentication of signaling traffic is critical to prevent intruders from easily impersonating legitimate users,” the document states. When authenticating to a softphone server, the NSA recommends using multifactor authentication.