Forum Systems Extends Enterprise SOA and Cloud Governance Capabilities to Secure Managed File Transfer

BOSTON, July 12, 2011 /PRNewswire/ --

Forum Sentry Provides Trading Partners with Enterprise-class, Seamless FTP Migration via Extensible, Unified, Protocol-independent Platform

Forum Systems, a wholly owned subsidiary of Crosscheck Networks, Inc., today announced significant enhancements to its flagship Forum Sentry Gateway delivering real-time, protocol-independent, secure exchange of documents of any size among trading partners. Legacy Managed File Transfer (MFT) deployments can now leverage existing investments while extending and migrating their deployments to modern SOA and Cloud services.

This announcement follows closely on the heels of the introduction of Forum Sentry's Web Application Firewall ( WAF) capabilities. It also reflects a dominant consolidation and migration trend toward Cloud and SOA Governance that enables centralized policy management, monitoring and security enforcement across the plethora of old and new message formats and protocols common within large companies.

Developed in the 1970s, File Transfer Protocol (FTP) has long been the networking standard of choice for financial services, healthcare and government organizations to facilitate high-volume exchange of information including 401(k) participant data, X-rays and other diagnostic information, and tax documentation, respectively.

According to Gartner Senior Research Analyst Thomas Skybakmoen, FTP "has been seen as the de facto method for exchanging large packets of data over the Internet."(1) Despite FTP's critical role in supporting bulk information transfer for more than 30 years, though, Skybakmoen notes that "as file sizes and the volume of files transferred increased, in combination with the increase in business partners and applications, many found the need to look to alternatives that provide support for larger file sizes (typically over 2GB), improved throughput, the managing of simultaneous transfers of multiple files to multiple endpoints, better scalability and integration (A2A), and that better integrate into current SOA and cloud environments."(1)

To help businesses evaluate and select MFT to replace their FTP solutions, Skybakmoen and Research Vice President Paolo Malinverno advise that, "Organizations too often consider MFT vendors that only meet short-term tactical needs to replace an unsecured FTP solution. However, organizations should look at long-term strategic needs, and to vendors that offer a complete MFT solution that will integrate into existing technology, where the SOA COE [center of excellence] can provide one centralized governance service for file transfer."(2) Further, Gartner counsels organizations that "it's more prudent to deploy a product that offers easy expansion and upgradability to handle multiple protocols and multiple standards in a managed way that is fully auditable."(2)

"More than 80 percent of data still resides in deep, back-office mainframes and legacy systems," said Mamoon Yunus, president and CEO of Crosscheck Networks. "FTP will continue to play a critical role in B2B document exchange, but its limitations around security, scalability and file-size support are well-documented. Our latest release of Forum Sentry empowers organizations with an extensible, unified platform that supports FTP, FTPS and SFTP to preserve existing investments in legacy infrastructure, provides a platform for MFT, and offers 'future-proofing' for when enterprises are ready to leverage SOAP- and XML-based Web services in a current SOA architecture."

Already driving secure B2B exchange for hundreds of organizations worldwide - and at all stages of the deployment spectrum - key new capabilities now available in Forum Sentry include:

• Streaming Security Support - Offers content-level security for structured and unstructured data for documents of unlimited size based on the widely used OpenPGP standard.

• Flexible Protocol- and Content-level Security - Enables message transfer over a variety of secured and unsecured transport protocols while ensuring content-level security.

• Centralized Governance and Migration - Organizations can seamlessly migrate from batch FTP processing to SOAP with Attachments (MIME, DIME, MTOM), while using existing centralized governance policies across legacy and modern message formats.

(1) Gartner, "FTP Replacement: Where MFT Makes Sense and Why You Should Care" by Thomas Skybakmoen, November 8, 2010

(2) Gartner, "Managed File Transfer Offers Solutions for Governance Needs" by Thomas Skybakmoen, Paolo Malinverno, August 25, 2010

About Forum Systems

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 http://www.forumsys.com.

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