Forum Systems Extends Enterprise SOA and Cloud Governance Capabilities to Secure Managed File Transfer
By Crosscheck Networks Inc., PRNEMonday, July 11, 2011
BOSTON, July 12, 2011 -
Forum Sentry
Provides Trading Partners with Enterprise-class, Seamless FTP
Migration via Extensible, Unified, Protocol-independent
Platform
Forum Systems, a wholly
owned subsidiary of
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
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
All product and company names herein may be trademarks of
their respective owners.
Bryan Grillo, CHEN PR, +1-781-672-3129, bgrillo at chenpr.com
Tags: Boston, Crosscheck Networks Inc., July 12, Massachusetts
