Forum Systems Outlines Infrastructure Decision Criteria for State-of-the-Art Service-Oriented Architecture Data Centers; Guidelines Offered to Ensure Successful Long-Term Strategy to Support Scaleable Internal and External Web Services

Business Wire, March 23, 2006

SALT LAKE CITY -- Forum Systems, the leader in Web services and SOA security infrastructure for XML acceleration, threat protection and trust management, today announced a list of the top five infrastructure decision criteria that have the greatest impact on the long-term success of enterprise data center strategies for companies planning for or implementing Service-Oriented Architecture (SOA). SOAs are transforming the enterprise by optimizing the re-use of IT assets, delivering innovative Web-based services and significantly lowering application integration costs. Business and IT applications as a set of "software services" allow companies to be more responsive and better adapt to changes in business conditions resulting from shifts in regulations, changing market requirements and competitive pressures.

In a recent report, Gartner stated, "By 2007, SOA will be the mainstream software engineering practice, ending the 40-year domination of monolithic architectures." However to take advantage of SOAs and loosely coupled software services the enterprise data centers will have to be retrofitted with capabilities to address an evolving Web services security and threat profile, opportunities for better management of applications and systems and the need to support application developers designing configurable, meta-data driven Web services.

"One of the side effects of the movement to SOA is the formerly separate worlds of network administration and application development which are becoming increasingly intertwined," said Ron Schmelzer, senior analyst at ZapThink. "A datacenter built for SOA must define how hardware assets as well as software services are secured, controlled and accessed. Companies like Forum Systems have been entrenched with SOA implementations and their field experience is of value to organizations looking to make intelligent datacenter decisions."

"Its time to look at the long-term infrastructure requirements through well-articulated base-line requirements that can be interpreted by business units, IT managers and application developers," said Wes Swenson, CEO for Forum Systems. "SOA is a paradigm shift that mandates a serious look at technology and implementation decisions that will ensure a successful transformation."

To underscore the significance of a well thought out plan for SOA-based applications, Forum Systems recommends that organizations introduce datacenter infrastructure components such as middleware, networking, security and management that meet these guidelines:

1. Components adhere to Web services and XML (eXtensible Markup
       Language) open standards and then secondly to additional
       vendor specifications

    2. Components demonstrate interoperability and/or integration with
       SOA principles of design, development, testing, operations and
       maintenance -- i.e. can be fit within a governance and
       enforcement framework

    3. Components can scale across heterogeneous IT assets, composite
       applications and business processes that span corporate
       boundaries

    4. Components should be capable of intelligent instrumentation for
       capture and measurements of various metrics associated with
       orchestrated services, messages and transactions

    5. Components must fit within a security architecture that
       addresses Simple Object Access Protocol (SOAP), Web Services
       Description Language (WSDL) and XML data trust enablement,
       threat protection and information assurance

Customers can benefit from this generalized set of criteria to judge how far along a vendor product is to being "SOA-ready." These five criteria are a reflection of what Forum Systems has gathered from the last six years of proposals, prototypes and, more importantly, production SOA implementations and deployments. The guidelines should be considered a litmus test for decision makers to determine whether an infrastructure component is extensible enough to fit within SOA datacenters.

Forum System's award-winning Web services and SOA security infrastructure is being used by datacenters for the IRS, Amazon.com, Providian, T-Mobile, Citigroup and Motorola and over 150 other government and commercial organizations. For more information on state-of-the art datacenters for SOAs please visit www.forumsys.com or contact bherron@forumsys.com.

About Forum Systems

Trustworthy, ubiquitous and robust Web services can only be achieved by combining security controls that are proactive, always on and systematic. Forum Seamless Security Solutions Architecture (Forum S3A(TM)) is an adaptive approach to building security-minded service-oriented applications and data-level networks using life-cycle solutions, including vulnerability management, testing systems, firewalls and gateways. Forum products are available as software, PCI-card and appliance options and comply with government requirements, including CheckPoint OPSEC Certification, FIPS Certification, Common Criteria EAL 4 (in process) and JITC DoD PKI Certification. Forum Systems is an active a member of OASIS and WS-I, helping mature standards such as WS-I Basic Profiles, SAML and WS-Security. Customers can benefit from Forum technology that is bundled with market-leading products: Microsoft ISA Server 2004, NetContinuum NC-1000 WSE, Crossbeam Systems, Breach Security and Network Engines NS6300X. For more information on adaptive solutions for Web services security visit http://www.forumsys.com.