Microsoft Places Business Security as Its Forefront Priority-Press Release

Kuala Lumpur , March 13, 2007 – Managing business information security can be a daunting task, especially with the rapid rise of new emerging threats and the disparity of today’s security market. In the coming years, the biggest challenges in managing business security will be reactive, maintenance-focused activities, such as keeping up-to-date with security solutions, keeping up-to-date with new threats and keeping costs down.

Microsoft ( Malaysia) Sdn Bhd today announced the availability of the Microsoft Forefront suite of security products as a key component of its strategy to provide Malaysian organisations with an end-to-end, defence-in-depth security solution.

Microsoft Forefront represents the company’s first move into the business security market with a single brand strategy and comprehensive suite of applications. The family of security products will help to protect business information and control access across desktops and laptops, servers and networks.

It also delivers on Microsoft's Trustworthy Computing initiative and demonstrates Microsoft's commitment to continually create software products with enhanced security, increased reliability, and simplified administration.

Ramesh Rajandran, Product Marketing Manager, at Microsoft in Malaysia, said, “ Microsoft developed the Forefront suite of security products to address the growing challenges of widespread connectivity, evolving threats, fragmented solutions, and operational difficulties.

“We believe that in order to address these challenges, any properly constituted security solution must provide comprehensive protection, easily integrate with existing IT infrastructure, and simplify security deployment and management.”

Ramesh explained that today’s security market landscape is complex and fragmented. The fact remains that even if businesses are able to build a reasonable secure infrastructure, several security solutions providers may be needed to get best-of-breed firewall, anti-virus, anti-spyware and encryption technology. The resulting solutions are difficult to manage, have increased total cost of ownership, and potentially leaving gaps in the security of the network.

Microsoft promises to solve this problem by providing businesses with a comprehensive end-to-end suite of security solutions across the client, server and network edge. The intention is to provide businesses with a dashboard view of their entire security infrastructure to gain greater control over access and protect critical business information.

In addition, Microsoft Forefront works better together with the rest of the product line, integrates easily with existing IT infrastructures and can be supplemented through interoperable third-party solutions.

Kitson Lim, Group CEO of Persoft Systems Sdn Bhd - a Microsoft partner - said, “I think that IT professionals will appreciate how Microsoft is helping the security industry to solve its complex and fragmented image. Having a comprehensive, integrated and simplified security architecture will go a long way to help our customers reduce costs associated with building and managing a disparate security system.

“Already we have customers that are very interested to find out more about the benefits of Microsoft Forefront and whether they can deploy the solution on their existing infrastructures. Overall, we believe that customers are happy because Microsoft is stepping up to the security challenge, and that they now have an option to ensure the protection of their business all under one roof.”

The products current available under the Microsoft Forefront suite of security products:

  • Microsoft Forefront Client Security – provides malware protection for business desktops, laptops and server operating systems that's easier to manage and control.
  • Microsoft Forefront Security for Exchange Server – helps businesses protect their Microsoft Exchange Server messaging environments from viruses, worms, and spam.
  • Microsoft Forefront Security for SharePoint - manages and integrates industry-leading antivirus scan engines to help provide comprehensive protection against the latest threats, inappropriate content, and disclosure of confidential information

All three products are designed to simplify deployment, configuration, management, reporting, and analysis so that users and administrators can have greater confidence that the organisation is well-protected.

Ramesh added, “We want to provide products that simplify the task of securing important business data, so that organisations can dedicate more time and resources into driving greater value for their businesses.

“Microsoft is delivering on a promise to help businesses address the challenges they face with regard to securing and accessing IT infrastructure. Our goal is to build more functionality and value into our core security products to minimise the impact on our customers’ infrastructure.”

About Microsoft

Microsoft ( Malaysia) Sdn Bhd is a subsidiary of Microsoft Corporation and was incorporated on July 8, 1992.

Founded in 1975, Microsoft is the worldwide leader in software, services and Internet technologies for personal and business computing. The company offers a wide range of products and services designed to empower people through great software – any time, any place and on any device.

 


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