Forum Systems Enables Secure Enterprise Mobility

Bolsters FIPS 140-2 Certified API Gateway with Edge Caching for Network Optimization and Amazon S3 Integration for Secure Enterprise-to-Cloud Storage

Expands Identity Formats, Including OAUTH 2.0, to Simplify Mobile SSO

BOSTON, Oct. 1, 2013 /PRNewswire/Forum Systems Inc. today announced significant enhancements to its Forum Sentry API Security Gateway that enable global organizations to take their mobile computing initiatives to the next level — optimizing their enterprise network resources while securely and cost effectively leveraging public and private cloud infrastructures.

According to a recent Forrester Research report, “for most data-intensive workloads, sending large volumes of data over the WAN remains a barrier because of increased bandwidth cost and unpredictable or unacceptable performance. What’s more, API integration to cloud providers is a challenge for most firms, and security concerns remain.”

Processing and securing more than 10 billion transactions per day worldwide, Forum Sentry significantly reduces the cost and complexity of centralizing security, identity and governance for hundreds of global organizations. The industry leader in SOA, XML and Mobile Gateway technology, Forum Sentry provides FIPS 140-2 level security and holds the industry’s only patent for cryptographic acceleration of security processing. Expanding these market-leading capabilities, Forum Sentry now includes intelligent edge caching to help enterprises optimize their network resources, and reduce latency and infrastructure costs.

“Global enterprises continue to be challenged by mobile users’ insatiable demand for anytime, anywhere access, while ensuring the highest levels of network security. Forum Sentry, the industry’s only FIPS 140-2 secured edge caching solution that provides tight integration with all enterprise-class identity stores, helps achieve both objectives,” said Mamoon Yunus, Founder of Forum Systems and CEO of Crosscheck Networks. “Instead of bulk caching information, Forum Sentry aligns users and groups with the requisite level of data ‘freshness’ and performance, delivering the application response and information users demand. It also ensures the identity and security IT organizations require — without needing to do deep programming or incur the cost of building a massive infrastructure.”

Enforcing granular security policies, Forum Sentry eliminates infrastructure I/O redundancy and database query overload through intelligent caching of both static and dynamic response types. It reduces the load on core IT infrastructure such as mainframes, application servers and packaged enterprise applications. Forum Sentry also provides optimized multitier caching that utilizes memory, HDD and on-board flash.

Notably, Forum Sentry offers deep integration with leading cloud providers, including Amazon S3. Doing so allows organizations to centralize control for seamless, bi-directional enterprise-to-cloud traffic. Importantly, it allows enterprises to leverage their existing corporate identity stores for Single Sign-On (SSO) and read-write authorization to Amazon S3.

Underscoring its reputation as the de facto standard for hardened perimeter devices, Forum Sentry enables organizations to set corporate encryption policies before sending data over the WAN to ensure maximum privacy while utilizing public clouds. Through its edge caching capabilities, Forum Sentry also eliminates the need to retrieve the most often used content from external cloud providers — helping reduce network congestion and data transfer and request costs.

“It’s common for leading financial services firms to handle millions of transactions per day,” said Santosh Kokate, Lead Enterprise Architect at Synovus. “Forum Sentry serves as a cornerstone of our SOA architecture, and we welcome its new capabilities as we look forward to enhancing the banking experience of our online and mobile banking customers.”

The Forum Sentry features that reinforce secure enterprise mobility include:

  • Secure edge caching technology for dynamic and static content with intelligent response segmentation based on credential tokens, URI, headers and request body.
  • Extended portal and mobile SSO support to provide 1-factor and 2-factor authentication schemes with OAUTH, SAML and custom identity systems.
  • New decoding formats and binary analytic signatures for request and response transaction analysis strengthen Intrusion Detection Prevention and Data Leakage Prevention.

About Forum Systems

Forum Systems, a wholly owned subsidiary of Crosscheck Networks, Inc., is the innovation leader in content security gateway technology. The industry’s most comprehensive solution for centralized security, identity and governance for SOA, REST and mobile communications, Forum Sentry enables comprehensive threat mitigation and trust enablement, providing enterprises and government organizations worldwide with the foundation for achieving Secure Service Mediation. Processing more than 10 billion transactions per day worldwide, the FIPS- and DoD-certified Forum Sentry API Security Gateway delivers unparalleled protection against HTML-, XML-, SOAP- and REST-based vulnerabilities. Notably, Forum Systems products provide simplified integration and task processing with over 100 built-in, standards-based processing tasks. For more information, please visit www.forumsys.com.