Microsoft Security products?
No longer an oxymoron!
Yesterday, I was at the Microsoft Forefront and System Center launch event in Beverly Hills, California, where Microsoft demoed both products to an impressed audience.
If you had any doubts that Microsoft was deadly serious about security, you had better erase them. Immediately!
Microsoft introduced the Forefront line of products (and an attendant roadmap) that was remarkable for the breadth of area covered, from the client to the server to the network edge.
Remarkable, in that while the poducts in the suite are based on existing products and then some, the suite offers an end-to-end product line, a boon to network administrators.
Forefront Client security is a new product that ties in neatly with the Forefront Security for Exchange Server, which is the current evolution of the Antigen product line Microsoft purchased a while ago. Antigen for SharePoint has also evolved, becoming Forefront Security for SharePoint. ISA Server 2006 and Intelligent Application Gateway 2007 make up the Edge protection server/device.
This is a welcome development.
The close integration of this family of software products is welcome, and since Forefront allows you the use of whatever scanning engine(s) you want, extends the ability IT managers have to protect their current security investments.
We have been in the Forefront Client Security beta since September, and are looking forward to testing this new suite of products in a live environment.
For the IT manager and for solution providers, I feel this is a product that must be investigated thoroughly for addition to one’s security offerings.
What do you think of Microsoft being in Security? Am I being naïve or unduly optimistic? Are you trying it out?
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