Forum Systems has announced a unified Web application firewall (WAF) and XML gateway on a single platform, combining identity management and authentication, threat detection and blocking, malware filtering and XML processing for complex, high-volume Web transaction environments, such as financial services.
The Forum Sentry WAF Gateway integrates the functionality of Forum's WAF XML gateway on one appliance, optimized to handle the resource-intensive combination of processes, including encryption/decryption, without degrading performance of latency-sensitive transactions.
Prior to the new release, enterprises would have to split traffic received through their application delivery controller load-balancing systems (from providers such as Citrix Systems, Cisco Systems, F5 Networks and Radware ) into HTML and XML/SOAP for security filtering and identity controls before passing it to the appropriate application servers.
Synovus Financial, a Columbus, Ga.-based financial services company, uses Forum Sentry WAF in front of its Web services to provide XML authentication. The company was looking for a way to provide dynamic, flexible Web services so that authentication could be applied by vendor, based on how they came in, as well as to assign controls and deliver services segregated by vendors and their requirements.
"We looked at their authentication platform and how easy it was," says Santosh Kokate, lead technical analyst at Synovus. "As we learned more, we added power to our architecture by virtualizing Web services, processing traffic, providing HTTP filtering and pattern-matching for threats like SQL injection. Our whole SOA architecture has become robust."
