Microsoft announced two new products yesterday: Forefront Client Security, which is aimed at detecting malware, worms, and other vulnerability exploits, and Microsoft System Center Essentials, a management tool for midsize IT environments. Forefront management will be built into System Center Essentials, along with a long list of other Microsoft products.
Some may question the wisdom of having the software maker be responsible for protecting its own operating systems and other software, believing that it is a conflict of interest. I have mixed feelings about it, and I have a couple of questions. If Microsoft wants to make money selling AV software, then what drives them to make their newer versions of Windows or Office more secure? If they couldn't patch or mitigate a problem when writing the code, then why do they expect to be able to do it later?
Can we eventually expect Windows Update to be a pay-as-you-go service, or will there be tiers of support where Forefront or OneCare customers get certain patches immediately while the rest have to wait for a public release? Microsoft will have to be very careful not to alienate corporate IT departments; it has a fine line to walk between the viability of Forefront Client Security as a profitable offering and hurting their already less-than-sterling image in the security world.
On the other hand, Microsoft System Center Essentials looks promising. We tried using Microsoft Operations Manager (MOM) here and still use it for our Exchange infrastructure, but overall, it was far too complex to meet our needs. There is a sweet spot between knowing enough to help troubleshoot, maintain, and improve your IT infrastructure and being buried in deep piles of meaningless data. MOM gave me more then enough information, but no easy interface with which to deal with it.
If System Center Essentials is a pared-down, easy-to-use version of MOM, it will likely be a hit in many midsize and small shops. In the next couple of years I expect the vast majority of new servers to be virtual machines, and having something to manage them with will become even more important when you can't walk into your data center and eyeball what you have.
Software like Microsoft's System Center Virtual Machine Manager or VMware's Virtual Infrastructure are just the start; eventually you should be able to have your virtual machines integrated with Active Directory and with a single click, provision your virtual hardware and software installs all from a single interface. Hopefully System Center Essentials is a step in that direction. I'm downloading it now to test it out, and I'll report back soon with my results.
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