Microsoft is looking to carry some unity and clarity to its Forefront family of enterprise protection and identification products the week prior to the RSA safety conference.Doug Leland, the Common Manger of Microsoft;s Identification and Protection Division, continues to be on the road show with press and analysts for that previous few of months to clarify Microsoft;s evolving strategy with this area. Following chatting with him, here are my five leading take-aways about what Microsoft has planned for Forefront:one. Microsoft strategies to flip Forefront into not just a family members of goods,
Microsoft Office 2010 Professional, but a developer platform, as well. Safety and identification want to be embedded and not handled just as being a bolt-ons to existing solutions, Leland stated. Microsoft is nonetheless operating out the details of what its mixed protection and identification stack will appear like, but a number of the core components are currently recognized. In the base-level, Microsoft is creating on leading of existing protocols, like LDAP. Over that, it can be opening up the Identity Lifecycle Manager programming interfaces and its protection assessments to interested third-party coders. And on top of that, Microsoft is exposing its “Geneva” federated-identity framework (formerly recognized as “Zermatt”).2. Forefront is part of Microsoft;s cloud strategy on the few of different levels. Microsoft starting to roll out cloud-based versions of its Forefront wares, starting with the just-announced Forefront Online Security for Exchange. But Geneva — which now is the codename for both the Zermatt framework and the next version of the Active Directory Federation Service (ADFS) identification service itself — also is part with the Azure Services framework, specifically the .Net Services piece, Leland said. (So Geneva is/was part with the Zurich layer of Microsoft;s Azure cloud platform. Sometimes Microsoft;s codenames truly do tell a story….)3. Beta 2 of Stirling is out. Stirling, the next version of Microsoft;s integrated Forefront suite (plus a unified management console) is running behind schedule, as Microsoft revealed a few weeks ago. Microsoft released a public Beta 2 of Stirling today, April 16.[What About Microsoft Morro?] –>