Security

In a hosted service, voice firewalls are all managed by the carrier with carrier-grade security management. Customers do not have to be involved with firewall management for voice communications, avoiding the need to employ expensive technical talent or pay for it on an outsourced basis. Hosted services also provide centrally managed intrusion detection, and customers avoid the same overhead costs to manage intrusion detection for their maintenance ports.
Hosted service customers do not have to manage server security patches and fixes and associated issues of version control, regression testing and compatibility of OS versions with applications.  Software patches are becoming a time-consuming management nightmare in the IP-telephony environment.  In some cases, customers may even refuse to download specific software because of known problems. In other cases there may be issues with version control, and updated versions causing problems with working software. As a result, customers may spend some significant time testing patches to make sure they work.  Hosted equipment also has very good physical security in a carrier datacenter. It is well-guarded and has well-defined security practices. Some CPE environments may have equivalent security, but most do not.