Deploying Unified Communications (UC) soft clients on DoD networks must have Authorizing Official (AO) approval.

This use case addresses situations whereby UC soft client applications on workstations are not the primary voice communications device in the work area. This means that there is a validated mission need and the number of UC soft clients permitted to operate inside the LAN will be less than the number of hardware based phones in the LAN. This number should be limited to those UC soft clients required to meet specific mission requirements. There are scenarios for the use of limited numbers of UC soft clients in the strategic LAN. The first of these scenarios is providing support for UC soft clients associated with a VoIP system in another enclave. This is a remote access scenario and must operate as they would in a normal remote access use case. If this scenario is approved, special accommodations must be made in the local LAN to support users from a remote LAN and permit them to connect to their home enclave. This could include segregating them on a separate dedicated LAN with its own boundary protection or by implementing a dedicated VLAN protection zone while opening the enclave boundary to permit the remote connection.

Voice/video and data must reside on separate VLANs for the protection of the voice infrastructure. However, recognizing that requiring a NIC to be configured to support voice/video and data VLANs is not a viable solution, voice and data traffic can coexist in the data VLAN when leaving the workstation. Based on the Unified Capabilities Requirements (UCR) requirement that the Unified Capabilities (UC) application tag its signaling and media traffic with the proper UCR defined Differentiated Service Code Point (DSCP), the LAN access switch port can route the UC traffic to the voice/video VLAN. If the LAN access switch is not capable, then routing upstream must perform this. A separate NIC is not required to support VLANs for voice and video segmentation under UC.