Ubiquitous Communication Through WebRTC
Welcome to Aventis Systems’ Techie Tips for 2014. If you have been a
follower of these installments, you have seen a wide variety of posts
covering the IT industry: everything from cloud to hardware
infrastructure. However, there is one topic that, while strictly speaking,
falls into the IT realm that we rarely touch on here. This is the topic
of software development and software releases.
As IT professionals, many of our users whose IT environment we support,
develop software applications for a living. The rest of our users use those
applications to accomplish work every day. This is why, when a technology
comes along that can impact our user base, we should be aware of it. Today,
I would like to introduce you to the humble browser. Whether you prefer
Chrome, Firefox, Opera, Internet Explorer or an alternative, until now, your
interaction with web applications has been limited to basic forms. Without
add-ons such as java, flash, or Active-X, it has been difficult to add
multimedia to a website. Unfortunately, for us as IT professionals, those
add-ons bring a lot more than just multimedia: compatibility requirements,
additional security vulnerabilities, and yet another piece of software to
update and support.
Over the last two years, HTML5 has gained a strong backing as a web
standard, and as part of this update to the World Wide Web protocol,
multimedia is now baked right into the browser - no 3rd-party extensions or
desktop software necessary. And while HTML5 capability in general is too
great in scope to discuss here, there is a project by Google that is being
incorporated into modern browsers which is making its way into the W3C
specifications. I am talking about the project known as WebRTC, and here is
why you should be aware of it.
WebRTC stands for Web Real Time Communications, and it is poised to supplant
the additional software that used to be required for video and audio
communication over the web. WebRTC provides a platform for developers to
easily add real-time video and audio capability into their web pages. You
read that right - real time communications straight from any website, to any
peer, in a conference setting or one on one.
This platform is already part of the latest Chrome, Firefox and Opera line
of browsers, and there are demos from Google that will impress anyone who is
not familiar with this technology. I won't belabor the paradigm shift that
is looming due to these browser advances, however, I will point out a few
thoughts to consider for the IT managing professional.
In the previous decade, the security net traffic protocol known as https was
seldom used outside of eCommerce website purchases and bank website access.
Since then, Google's Gmail service was one of the first to standardize using
https to encrypt communications between the browser and Google's servers.
In recent years, many social media companies have followed suit. The impact
of https on network security is that only the recent crop of security
products can intercept https traffic and analyze it to apply security
policies.
Looking ahead at the adoption of real-time communications using the WebRTC
technologies, it will be even more difficult to monitor network traffic and
intercept malicious applications since embedding information in real-time
network streams will render it invisible to current IDS and network security
devices. Added to that, because WebRTC uses web protocols, it is more
difficult to distinguish from traditional web traffic than current voice and
video applications.
As a technologist, I tend to be optimistic, and I foresee WebRTC challenging
the market of existing providers of voice and data communications. Even
though this technology will be disruptive, it will make the Internet even
more multimedia driven than it is today, making voice and video interaction
on websites common, and building a sense of presence on websites that, up
until now, has been elusive.