LAS VEGAS and BOSTON, Nov. 28, 2012 /PRNewswire/ -- GARTNER APPLICATION ARCHITECTURE, DEVELOPMENT & INTEGRATION SUMMIT 2012, BOOTH S23 -- Forum Systems, a Crosscheck Networks, Inc. company, today announced significant enhancements to its Forum Sentry Security Gateway that allow organizations worldwide to more seamlessly, securely extend their enterprise networks to the iPhone, iPad, Android, BlackBerry and other leading mobile device platforms.

Delivering on users' demands for the productivity and flexibility afforded by BYOD, while ensuring enterprise-caliber performance, security and privacy, the announcement was made in conjunction with the Gartner Application Architecture, Development & Integration Summit 2012 taking place this week at Caesars Palace in Las Vegas.

According to a recent Gartner, Inc. survey, "90 percent of enterprises have already deployed mobile devices, with smartphones being most widely deployed." The survey also revealed that "86 percent of enterprises surveyed said that they plan to deploy media tablets this year." Additionally, as part of its annual forecast of the top 10 strategic technology trends, Gartner recently predicted, "that by 2013 mobile phones will overtake PCs as the most common Web access device worldwide." These dynamics require that organizations capitalize on the benefits of BYOD, while safeguarding against the risks.

Forum Systems has a rich heritage in SOA and services-based architectures. Processing more than 10 billion transactions per day worldwide, Forum Sentry drives secure B2B exchange for hundreds of organizations in market sectors including telecommunications, financial services, federal and state government, and healthcare. Featuring more than 100 industry protocol and messaging standards, Forum Sentry offers out-of-the-box capabilities that dramatically reduce time-to-market, and lessen the cost and complexity of centralizing security, identity and governance.

"While a tremendous boon for users, mobile computing is a vexing proposition for most businesses," said Mamoon Yunus, Founder of Forum Systems and CEO of Crosscheck Networks. "Forward-looking global organizations are laying the groundwork for a successful mobile strategy. Services-based architectures enable these organizations to establish a solid foundation to extend their corporate networks to myriad mobile device platforms. By doing so, they can embrace BYOD most efficiently and effectively – providing the access and flexibility users need, while maintaining the network and data security parameters these businesses demand."

Customers Deploying Forum Sentry Earning Big Wins

For example, a major telecommunications provider in Germany sought to grant its users mobile access to Salesforce.com. The multinational company selected Forum Sentry based on its ability to act as a secure intermediary and provide multiple factors of mobile authentication, ensuring the security and data integrity of those corporate customer accounts. Enabling Single Sign-On (SSO), Forum Sentry seamlessly integrates with both Salesforce.com and a third-party, SIM-based, two-factor authentication solution. Mobile users are now presented with a login prompt followed by a text message with a PIN number. With these two credentials, they can safely access the Salesforce.com portal from their mobile devices.

A financial services company with approximately $26 billion in assets under management, Synovus's use of Forum Sentry represents another example of a business-critical deployment. The firm adopted a SOA strategy to enable legacy and new applications to securely share business rules and data, and help it deliver on its mission of providing best-in-class customer service. A cornerstone of its services-based architecture, Forum Sentry helped Synovus reduce its average online banking sign-in time by 70 percent.

Based on that success, Synovus then looked to extend the online banking experience to mobile users. Since mobile banking relied on the same services-based architecture already in place for online banking, Synovus was able to introduce new mobile banking services within 40 days. With Forum Sentry centralizing access control and identity management, Synovus now supports more than 10,000 customers accessing their accounts through iPhone, Blackberry, Android and WAP clients.

Building on Market-leading Capabilities

Key new features in Forum Sentry that enable rapid, secure mobile to enterprise network integration – eliminating the need to introduce any custom developer code – include:

• Automated SOAP-to-REST and REST-to-SOAP Conversion ensures accessibility to enterprise-class data for mobile device applications. Forum Sentry now includes extensive mobile message format support for HTML, XHTML, JSON, XML and SOAP.
• Comprehensive OAUTH 2.0 Support for unifying identity decisions across multiple systems.
• SAML IdP and SP-Initiated Support for seamless SSO connectivity between application cloud providers including Salesforce.com AppExchange, Google Apps Marketplace and Intuit Marketplace.
• AMQP, RabbitMQ and ActiveMQ Support augments Forum Sentry's direct integration support for 99 percent of the industry's JMS providers. Combined with Forum Sentry's protocol conversion in-line during transaction flows, this enables simplified exposure of data and services to mobile computing consumers using HTTP or HTTPS protocols.
• Mobile Device One-factor and Two-factor Authentication with HTTP redirects, token authentication, session management, and user role and properties mappings provides enhanced identity enforcement and management.

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 XML 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.

All product and company names herein may be trademarks of their respective owners.

SOURCE Forum Systems