Breaking News - Security:

Oblix, Forum Systems To Deliver Pervasive Security For SOAs

Oblix and Forum Systems announced a strategic alliance under which Oblix will resell and integrate the Forum XWall web services firewall as part of the Oblix COREsv solution for Web services management. The combined offering gives enterprises a single point for managing the security of internal and external-facing web applications and Web services. Initial integration has been completed and an integrated offering is in pre-release.

Oblix and Forum Systems are completing the full security picture for enterprises building a service-oriented architecture (SOA)-comprehensive security at the perimeter of an enterprise and iron clad security from within. By integrating the two products, customers can manage security policies from a single place, improving overall security and lowering administrative costs. In addition, a single framework for monitoring security activity and creating and applying uniform policies for both web applications and Web services gives enterprise the control and visibility they need to comply with various regulatory requirements.

"Enterprises deploy security in two primary places: at the edge of their network and across their internal application environment," said Wes Swenson, president and CEO of Forum Systems. "By combining the Forum and Oblix solutions, we're delivering to our customer's pervasive security that ensures that a new breed of data-level threats are stopped at the door and then applying policies for interoperability enforcement, authentication, authorization, logging and more to all validated services once in."

"What identity-driven policy management did for user access, it's now doing for SOA," said Prakash Ramamurthy, senior vice president of products and technology at Oblix. "It's letting organizations control, secure, and manage a decentralized web world. Identity-driven policy management tightly coupled with strong perimeter controls delivers to the industry what's needed for SOAs to flourish."

Oblix COREsv, the industry's first solution for identity-driven web services management, provides customers with a flexible and non-intrusive policy enforcement framework that can be used for consistent enforcement of policies in distributed enterprise environments. By centrally defining and deploying operational policies and rules across the entire service network, customers can consistently implement and actively enforce IT policies and best practices without affecting existing business applications and while dramatically reducing the deployment and maintenance costs of managing distributed environments.

Forum XWall Web Services Firewall ensures critical applications are appropriately accessible and continuously available by allowing network administrators to enforce security policies that check the integrity of data and control access to exposed enterprise Web services. Forum XWall is equipped with data authentication, XML intrusion prevention and interoperability enforcement to actively protect against XML viruses, denial of Web service attacks and unauthorized data access -- all managed through the Forum IntelliConfig user interface for intuitive and streamlined administration that does not compromise security.