Microsoft Forefront Overview
Today’s security market landscape is complex and fragmented. Poor interoperability, separate management consoles for each product, and a general lack of unified event reporting and analysis all present challenges to the system administrator. In short, network protection is still too difficult to deploy, use, and manage, and it is expensive, as well. The deficiencies are especially problematic as security becomes an increasingly critical enabler for business solutions.
The Microsoft Forefront family of business security products helps provide greater protection and control over the security of your network infrastructure. Microsoft Forefront’s products easily integrate with each other, with your organization’s IT infrastructure, and can be supplemented through interoperable third-party solutions, enabling end-to-end, defense-in-depth security solutions. Simplified management, reporting, analysis, and deployment enable you to more efficiently protect your organization’s information resources and secure access to applications and servers. With highly responsive protection supported by Microsoft technical guidance, Microsoft Forefront helps you confidently meet ever-changing threats and increased business demands.
Forefront is a key component of Microsoft’s strategy for providing end-to-end security for business customers. This vision begins at the operating system. With the release of Windows XP SP2 and Windows Server 2003 SP1, vulnerabilities have been greatly reduced, and the upcoming releases of Windows Vista and Windows “Longhorn” Server are centered around robust security. Forefront security products augment the security of these operating systems by providing additional layers of security designed to protect information and control access to business-critical resources and information. The security of this information is further enhanced through robust digital rights management, ensuring that document-specific security and policy compliance is assured even if those documents get into unauthorized hands.
Microsoft’s security products are tied together through a powerful identity management infrastructure that provides fine levels of granularity and control. This control is further enabled by a broad set of management and reporting capabilities that offer robust event collection, analysis, and reporting, as well as the tools to create and enforce security best practices. Finally, Microsoft offers a wide array of technical and industry-specific guidance to help businesses configure their security products correctly and effectively.
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