Hi Gerald, All,
Many thanks for the reactions, and interest.
When we refer to the system being cloud-based we mean that the
analytical engine and processing is handled on our servers rather than
on the customers, the same way other hosted services are typically
provided (web analytics, hosted pbxs, etc). We feel there are many
advantages to this, especially in our case where we aim to provide fraud
detection on the PBX level.
I just want to clarify that the Humbug cloud service itself does not
connect to your AMI directly, rather we provide a downloadable agent
(the "humbug-collector") which resides on the customers PBX, and
connects to the manager locally (with a password unknown to Humbug) in
read-only mode. The Humbug-collector is provided as open source, and
essentially sends events that you want handled, fully encrypted to
Humbug via API. Its possible to send events in other formats (i.e from
the dialplan or AGI, etc) but we feel this is the best way to implement
for most Asterisk users.
We understand well that carriers employ analytics and fraud detection on
their traffic, and perhaps even have entire revenue-assurance teams to
handle cases. On the other side of the scale we see millions of PBXs
deployed, of all breeds and vendors, which essentially have no real
access to this technology both from an implementation and ROI standpoint
- leaving the unsuspecting user having to explain the $100,000 in
international phone calls
(http://www.computerworld.com/s/article/9194041/Security_Manager_s_Journal_Slammed_with_a_100_000_phone_bill).
With an estimated $80 billion lost annually to telecom fraud, and nearly
20% classified as "PBX/voicemail fraud", (CFCA 2009 global fraud loss
survey) we feel the solution is not a matter of perfecting algorithms in
existing systems, but rather of implementation, in which the analysis is
on done carrier-independent, by a dedicated service in the cloud. And
while we havent formally released the alerting system as part of the
analytics suite yet, we feel that the traffic visibility which analytics
provides is an important first line of defense.
I hope I clarified our intentions with the cloud service.
Kind Regards,
Boaz
Gerald Bove wrote:
Can I have a little more information on how this works in the cloud? I was just checking
out the site, and was very interested. I assumed it was just an app I ran either on the
asterisk server, or on a separate server, but if this is "cloud" based, that
kind of kills it.
Sending this type of information to a third party (a non-verified third part at that) is a big privacy concern. At the very least opening AMI or whatever this uses to pull the stats seems scary enough.
I think your find that no real carrier will take this product seriously if
that's how it works.
-----Original Message-----
From: [email protected]
[mailto:[email protected]] On Behalf Of Chris Bagnall
Sent: Wednesday, January 05, 2011 7:11 AM
To: 'Commercial and Business-Oriented Asterisk Discussion'
Subject: [BULK] Re: [asterisk-biz] Humbug Analytics - Falcon Release
Importance: Low
Some months ago we posted an open invitation to our beta of Humbug
Analytics, and I thought I would share some of our progress since, as this
may
be relevant to many of you.
I'm sure I can't be the only one who's thinking "this looks very nice, why
can't they release it as an app?" What's the obsession with "cloud"
everything these days?
Kind regards,
Chris
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