Schiphol-Rijk, the Netherlands, April 23, 2007 - Today, during a visit to the Netherlands, Steve Ballmer, CEO of Microsoft Corp., talked about Microsoft views on new, integrated management and security products for business users. The Microsoft Forefront security products help companies to solve their most urgent security problems: they protect them against the latest threats, give them safe access to their applications and data, and offer them easy security management. In May 2007 Microsoft will officially announce the Forefront products. Steve Ballmer also addressed Microsoft System Center, a complete family of solutions for end-to-end management of IT infrastructures, which highlight simplicity, pro-activity and efficiency. Together, Microsoft Forefront and Microsoft System Center will ensure optimal and total control of business automation so that companies can make more effective and productive use of their information and business applications.
“Companies face increasingly sophisticated security threats that are making the job of managing IT systems more complex all the time,� said Steve Ballmer. “Microsoft Forefront and Microsoft System Center are designed to meet our customers' needs for comprehensive and integrated security technology that is easy to manage and that enables safer, more reliable access to business applications and information.�

Microsoft Forefront
Microsoft Forefront products are designed for businesses. They protect business information at client, server, and network level besides offering safe access to it. Feedback has revealed that customers often have to install poorly integrated products to protect their IT environment. This merely adds to the expense of their security solutions and also demands heavy time investment from administrators who need to determine whether their company really is safe.
Important aspects of Microsoft Forefront are therefore the integration with the current IT infrastructure and the simplified implementation and management. The products are initially geared to integration with the current IT infrastructure and applications (e.g. Microsoft Exchange and Microsoft SharePoint). The focus in the longer term will be on improving security through integration between the client, the servers, and the network. Thanks to integration with the current infrastructure and simplified security management the Microsoft Forefront solutions enable the customers to manage their IT infrastructure more effectively and to regulate access to the information as their company deems necessary.
Microsoft Forefront builds on Microsoft's Trustworthy Computing (TWC) initiative, which has been running for five years and has brought about a change in the way Microsoft builds software.

The Forefront products comprise amongst others:

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