Creator and Provider of the Hospital and Medical Benefits System Picks Forum Sentry API Gateway to Ensure Agile, Secure Access for its Customers and Partners
Forum Systems Inc. today announced that HAMBS, a provider of software development and hosting services to Australia’s private health insurance industry, has selected the company’s industry-leading API security gateway, Forum Sentry, to ensure agile, secure access to its application and services, and better serve its customers and partners.
Founded in 1991, HAMBS is the creator and provider of the HAMBS (Hospital and Medical Benefits System) application, Australia’s top health insurance software application. Currently used by 23 health insurance funds, the state-of-the-art HAMBS application enables private health fund organizations to effectively manage their core businesses while maintaining legislative and regulatory compliance requirements.
Similar to many enterprise organizations, HAMBS has seen a rapid growth in the number of apps and services that customers and partners need to access. Many of these applications utilize different authentication and authorization methods, making access even more complex. With Forum Sentry, HAMBS was able to achieve API access that is both agile and secure.
As part of an infrastructure modernization initiative, HAMBS sought to securely expose its APIs to private health insurance funds, third parties and internal clients. Given the sensitive nature of the information being accessed, data security was of paramount importance. HAMBS not only required a secure solution, but also one that could easily integrate with new and legacy apps.
After evaluating several industry offerings, HAMBS initiated a proof of concept with the Forum Sentry API Gateway and one other gateway provider. With its robust security architecture and support of multiple authentication and authorization methods, including Basic Auth and OAuth 2.0, Forum Sentry quickly separated itself from the competition.
“Forum Systems’ security-first approach was a huge factor in our decision to go with Forum Sentry. It truly outperformed all of our evaluation criteria,” said Derek Grocke, Service Delivery Manager at HAMBS. “Additionally, Forum Sentry provided the SOAP-to-REST conversion we needed to enable RESTful apps to communicate with our existing SOAP infrastructure. Needless to say, it didn’t take long for us to conclude that Forum Systems was the best solution for our API security needs.”
Architected for deployment at the network edge, Forum Sentry is the only API gateway to achieve FIPS 140-2 and Network Device Protection Profile (NDPP) compliance. Performing complex access control decisions and enforcement, Forum Sentry acts as both an authorization server and a resource server authenticating inbound credentials with a custom internal database schema; federating these credentials via OAuth tokens for SSO; and delegating authentication to other services and APIs. Delivering secure, seamless integration across channels, applications and infrastructure, Forum Sentry is backed by world-class customer service and support.
“Forum Systems’ support is second to none,” noted John Ginn, System Architect at HAMBS. “They quickly had us up and running and promptly handled all of our requests.”
Another hallmark of Forum Systems is its no-code approach to provisioning and deploying policies. With a simple point-and-click interface, Forum Sentry enabled HAMBS to quickly expose new APIs and build a policy platform that is easy to maintain and extend.
“Serving as the cornerstone of HAMBS’ security architecture modernization efforts, Forum Sentry helps the organization preserve precious time and resources, providing it with the agile, secure infrastructure required to create more applications and better serve their customers and partners,” said Mamoon Yunus, CEO of Forum Systems. “We’re excited to be chosen by the de facto healthcare IT innovator in Australia and look forward to collaborating on their next deployment milestones.”
Additional Resources
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About HAMBS
HAMBS provides a wide range of software development and hosting services to Australia’s private health insurance industry. Established in 1991, HAMBS was formed when the then users of the HAMBS application purchased the intellectual property from the original developer of the software. At that time, there were three HAMBS employees looking after 20 member funds.
In a rapidly growing industry with increased regulation, technological advances and in an increased competitive environment, HAMBS continues to grow and expand on the services available to its customers. Today, HAMBS has more than 70 professional staff servicing 23 health funds nationwide, including the hosting of the application and network services for 19 funds. For more information, please visit www.hambs.com.au.
About Forum Systems
Forum Systems, a wholly owned subsidiary of Crosscheck Networks, Inc., is the innovation leader in API and cloud 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 NDPP-, FIPS- and DoD-certified Forum Sentry API Security 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.