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Microsoft raised eyebrows as it introduced the Forefront line of security products on Monday. This represents a much larger shift towards security on the part of the software giant, but also puts the company in the delicate position of trying to sell fixes for its own products.
"You've got people asking why they should pay to plug the holes created by the products that Microsoft sells," said Andrew Braunberg, a senior information security analyst with Current Analysis. It "is known not as a security provider but as a security problem."
Gartner vice president John Pescatore cites the slow speed at which Microsoft typically moves as another problem. "Unfortunately, new security threats won't wait for Vista or Longhorn." He thinks "it'll be a good three years before Microsoft has any large impact on enterprises. Businesses don't try the first version of anything, and they wait for version 3 of anything from Microsoft."
Despite these opinions, Braunberg thinks that because Microsoft is perfectly positioned to bundle security software in with Windows, "we see the standalone security market dying out over the next three-to-four years. Enterprises want security moved more into the OS."
Braunberg is not alone in that belief. "If companies can reduce their spending on AV, this should help them shift their budgets toward more important, emerging technologies like network access control. It's like Wal-Mart moving to town - they kill some vendors while others thrive because they do what Wal-Mart can't," Pescatore said.
Symantec may have been preparing for this eventuality when it acquired Veritas, a storage software maker, last year. The company appears to be moving into the storage and security management market. McAfee may have similar aspirations.
Despite naysayers, Microsoft seems proud of its Forefront products. "Forefront is the family brand that will bring Microsoft's security products together - client, server, and [network] edge," said Steve Brown, the director of product management for the company's security, access, and solutions division.
Forefront Client Security, formerly known as Microsoft Client Protection, is due out in beta form by the end of the year. General availability should be achieved within the first half of 2007. It will feature State Assessment Scan, which notices computers that are either configured insecurely or are in need of patches, and Single Profile Configuration, which is intended to make security policy implementation easier.
Forefront Security for Exchange Server and Forefront Security for SharePoint are both supposed to launch later this year. As re-branded versions of Microsoft's Antigen products, they will make use of multiple anti-spam and antivirus engines.
It should be very, very interesting to see how consumers and the security market react to the Forefront line.
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