The big videoconferencing vendors (Polycom, Lifesize, Cisco etc.)
only support their products for a limited time. After that they go
„end-of-life“ and don't receive any more updates. That doesn't
mean they don't work any longer. That H.323
standard how to do video conferences didn't change much in recent
years, so there is no need for updates to accomodate other changes. But you there is a certain risk that
they may have a security hole that doesn't get fixed any more.
Save money and stay independent
The vendors would prefer if you simply buy something new or subscribe
to their proprietary “cloud service”. But to you this means
spending money and a possible lock-in into their system versus just
keeping systems going that run fine and owning the technology yourself
with the independence that comes with it.
Move endpoints inside your firewall to private IPs
One important suggestion is to move end-of-life endpoints away from
public IP addresses and to private IPs inside your firewall. Out of
convenience many people used to operate their H.323 endpoints on
public IPs, but nowadays its not much of a problem to use H.460 NAT
traversal and move them to a safe place inside behind a GNU
Gatekeeper.
If you have very old endpoints that don't support support H.460 NAT
traversal, you can still do this. You just need a 2nd GNU Gatekeeper
inside your firewall that tunnels the calls out to your external GNU
Gatekeeper on the public IP. (Hey, its a free, you just need a 2nd
server!)
Replace infrastructure devices with a GNU Gatekeeper
Some infrastructure devices (gatekeepers, gateways, proxies etc.)
need to be on public IPs and thus there is a risk of exposing
possible security holes to the open internet. Many of those can be
replaced with a GNU Gatekeeper. Keep in mind it can be configured to
do many different things that ordinary gatekeepers don't do.
