Forum Systems Delivers Industry's First Unified Content Firewall

Forum Systems, a wholly owned subsidiary of Crosscheck Networks, Inc., today announced the next generation of its flagship XML Gateway fueling faster, more powerful and seamless Web experiences for users.

Forum Sentry WAF unites -- natively, for the first time in one appliance -- the threat protection, scalability and Federated Identity capabilities of an XML Gateway with the security of a Web Application Firewall (WAF). By removing the identity and security burden from Web sites and composite applications, this unified Content Firewall securely authenticates and authorizes users invoking services, regardless of where the services reside. Unlike legacy WAFs, Forum Sentry WAF enforces decisions across complex identity tokens and repositories and throughout the entire transaction, rapidly delivering rich online content to users without requiring multiple sign-ins.

Global enterprises continue to develop intelligent, sophisticated Web applications in response to end-users' demands for real-time information. Content-rich, widget-driven portals presenting comprehensive user information shared between and across multiple business lines has given rise to both HTML and XML data patterns. This dynamic is causing significant challenges for organizations as current WAFs are inherently unable to support, secure and scale this ever-increasing rise in hybrid traffic.

"With the convergence of browser- and application-based technologies accessing back-end systems that house corporate and user data, the requirement for protecting that sensitive information across and between corporate boundaries is paramount," said Mamoon Yunus, CEO of Crosscheck Networks. "Though current WAF offerings are a core component of IT infrastructures -- as PCI DSS requirements mandate the use of a WAF to protect cardholder data -- they cannot secure and scale both HTML and XML traffic and meet the deep content inspection demands of today's enterprises."

Yunus continued: "Compounding matters, the 'light' identity management capabilities available in the existing generation of WAFs make them woefully ill-equipped to handle Federated Identity decisions. In response to increasing customer demand fueled by such shortcomings, we are unveiling Forum Sentry WAF to power more secure, rapid and enhanced user-portal experiences."Based in Columbus, Georgia, Synovus is a financial services company with more than $30 billion in assets under management. Its multiple divisions provide commercial and retail banking, investment and mortgage services to customers in Georgia, Alabama, South Carolina, Florida and Tennessee.

Synovus is dedicated to delivering best-in-class service to its online and mobile banking customers. As part of that commitment, the firm ensures that when users sign in to access their accounts, network performance never impacts their ability to conduct transactions -- particularly during peak business hours. To accomplish that mission, Synovus consolidated its entire banking system on Forum Systems. Now with Forum Sentry WAF centralizing XML and HTML policies and performing the requisite identity management, Synovus has reduced sign-in time by more than 20 times what it was previously -- to just over 1 second -- significantly enhancing its users' experiences.

Key Forum Sentry WAF Benefits:

Forum Systems will be showcasing Forum Sentry WAF in Booth # F79 in the U.S. Pavilion at Infosecurity Europe 2011 taking place April 19-21, Earls Court, London UK. Forum Sentry WAF is available immediately.

Forum Systems, a wholly owned subsidiary of Crosscheck Networks, Inc., is a leader in Service Oriented Architecture (SOA) and XML security. Through comprehensive Threat mitigation and Trust enablement, Forum's family of hardware, software and cloud-based instances provides enterprises and government organizations with the foundation for achieving secure SOA federation. Processing more than one billion transactions per day worldwide, the FIPS- and DoD-certified Forum products offer the industry's most comprehensive protection against XML- and SOAP-based vulnerabilities. Forum Sentry has been issued an industry-first patent (7,516,333) for XML security functions such as XML Encryption, XML Decryption and XML Signatures using a network appliance. For more information, please visit www.forumsys.com.