"The security aspects of enterprise VOIP have been overblown," says Irwin Lazar, senior analyst at the Burton Group. "There's a lot more attention being paid to the fear of attack than what is actually possible."

Roger Farnsworth, manager of marketing for Secure IP Communications at Cisco, concurs: "VOIP systems can be at least as secure as traditional voice systems, and future IP technologies and voice applications will make them even more secure."

But Mark Collier, CEO of SecureLogix, a vendor of voice management and security platforms for both traditional phone systems and VOIP, isn't completely sold. "With IP at its foundation, it's simply unrealistic to expect VOIP to be any more robust than e-mail, the Web, or DNS," he says.

Hold the phone. E-mail? The Web? DNS? Who in their right mind would move from the rock-solid service of legacy enterprise telephony to a platform that's no more secure than e-mail?

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