Peer-to-peer (P2P) can be deployed for uses beyond file sharing, free phone calls, and illegal file sharing, and 'IT departments should not be afraid to deploy P2P systems that reduce work for the administrator and end user, but should think carefully about the policies they need to enforce and how that will be done in a P2P environment with distributed data and processing. P2P communication is at an interesting stage of development in which the technology can be deployed in a hybrid way and will be debated among standards bodies. The network administrator, however, is challenged to differentiate legitimate traffic from unsuitable file sharing, blocking of unsuitable file sharing and prevention from tunneling over communications channels, and prioritization of important P2P traffic. Several companies, including Avaya with Nimcat, Popular Telephony Peerio group, Cisco Linksys One, and others, are developing proprietary P2P and Session Initiation Protocol (SIP) based approaches to deal with the difficulties of creating small business phone systems with low configuration or administration requirements. EarthLink has also developed file sharing software that uses SIP instead of P2P to locate other users, which basically reverses many systems. The work uses SIP messages and existing Internet Engineering Task Force (IETF) standards for NAT traversals and security to build a file sharing system. Among unsettled issues is the fact that many Voice over IP (VoIP) 911 solutions require carefully provisioned devices, and the required tasks can be challenging in a distributed system.