I usually pride myself on keeping abreast of both new security technologies and Microsoft products, but I missed the ball on both with Microsoft Forefront. The three product lines under the Forefront banner give Microsoft their first comprehensive security solution aimed at the enterprise market, giving businesses malware protection at the client, server and edge levels.
As you can see the client agent is visually very reminiscent of Windows Live OneCare and sports the usual scanning and monitoring tools you get with the home product, but the similarities end there. Forefront Client Security is centrally managed and integrates with existing infrastructure (MOM Server for example) and when combine with the re-branded Antigen products for Exchange Server, Sharepoint Server and Instant Messaging plus the folding of ISA Server 2006 into the Forefront range you’ve got an end-to-end subscription based business security model.
Did you notice the ’subscription based’ in the last sentence? This piqued my interest too and initially gave rise to some concern, but subscription is how most anti-virus/malware products are subs based so this is probably a logically and, given the current pricing levels, also a financially prudent decision. As an example, for 750USD you can get a yearly subscription to the Exchange Server product for 50 users and similarly for 360USD a subscription to the Sharepoint product. Pricing isn’t available for the Client Security product as it’s still in beta, but if it’s along similar lines then Microsoft are on to a winner.
The beta of Microsoft Forefront Client Security can be downloaded here and the Forefront Security for Exchange and Sharepoint from here
