HERNDON, Va.--(BUSINESS WIRE)--Exostar, whose cloud-based solutions enable secure, cost-effective business-to-business collaboration, today announced the availability of a secure WebEx access feature within ForumPass, the company’s hosted, federated SharePoint-based service for multi-enterprise project collaboration. With this new capability, companies now can turn to a single solution that assures sensitive information is shared only amongst project team members, regardless of whether the transaction occurs through document exchange or WebEx meetings. As a result, ForumPass customers benefit from reduced risk and greater operating efficiencies.
“Strategies for securing collaboration with customers, partners, suppliers and other third parties must extend beyond document-oriented collaboration systems to all types of content exchange, such as web-conferencing systems,” said Neil MacDonald, VP and Gartner Fellow. “Solutions that offer a single, consistent approach to manage access control across all forms of content exchange provide the greatest protection for intellectual property for companies in highly regulated industries or which share extremely sensitive information.”
ForumPass facilitates projects and information to be segmented to one of three increasingly stringent security tiers, with each tier defined by access control rules configured by each customer’s administrator. Prior versions of ForumPass incorporated standard WebEx access methods, which was sufficient for projects that didn’t require strict access control protection. For projects in the more restrictive tiers, where digital certificates are necessary to reach the project team site, standard WebEx access methods negated the advantages of ForumPass’s existing security controls by allowing meeting URLs and passwords to be distributed to individuals who lacked the proper authorizations.
The latest release of ForumPass single-handedly regains the advantage by making it easy for organizations to lock down attendance at WebEx sessions. The enhanced ForumPass now includes a “restricted audience” option available to meeting hosts with projects in the more restrictive tiers, creating an end-to-end controlled environment for all information sharing across the B2B landscape. When the host creates a “restricted audience” meeting, ForumPass not only enforces two-factor authentication by requiring all participants to present the same unique digital certificates they were issued to access the project team site before they are permitted to join the meeting, but also ensures consistent access control across SharePoint and WebEx. Meeting organizers can view an audit history of eligible attendees to confirm only valid individuals received invitations and participated in the meeting.
“In conversations with our customers and prospects, the issue of securing access to WebEx meetings to ensure attendance is restricted to authorized users came up time and time again,” said Vijay Takanti, Vice President of Security and Collaboration Solutions at Exostar. “They are justifiably concerned about the compromise of sensitive information exchanged during these events, particularly for recurring meetings where the intrusion can be ongoing. We’ve invested in the development of the first cloud-based solution that allows businesses to leverage the power of SharePoint and WebEx with a consistent, comprehensive platform that delivers end-to-end secure collaboration, regardless of how information is shared.”
About Exostar
Exostar powers secure business-to-business information sharing, collaboration and business process integration throughout the value chain. Exostar supports the complex trading needs of many of the world's largest companies in aerospace and defense, life sciences, and other industries. Exostar’s cloud-based identity assurance products and business applications reduce risk, improve agility and strengthen trading partner relationships and profitability for over 70,000 companies worldwide, including BAE Systems, The Boeing Company, Lockheed Martin Corp., Raytheon Co. and Rolls-Royce. For more information, please visit www.exostar.com.