Today Microsoft released beta 2 of “Geneva,” our open platform that dramatically simplifies user access and secure collaboration across organizational boundaries.
“Geneva” is part of our Business Ready Security strategy. It supports the strategy’s tenets of “integrating and extending security across the enterprise” and helping to “protect everywhere, access anywhere” through interoperability with heterogeneous environments and third party solutions.
Speaking of which, with beta 2 we’re announcing interoperability between “Geneva” and identity & access solutions from leading partners, via the SAML 2.0 and WS-Federation standards. Interoperable partner solutions include CA Federation Manager and CA SiteMinder, Novell Access Manager, SAP NetWeaver and Sun’s OpenSSO Enterprise and Fedlet software. We are issuing interoperability white papers with these partners and at TechEd this week SAP is presenting on their work with “Geneva.”
“Geneva” addresses a number of important customer challenges:
Implementing cross-organization single sign on
Connecting people and applications with those of other business units, customers, and partners is typically costly, risky and a drag on collaboration. Through identity federation in “Geneva,” IT departments can facilitate collaboration without managing extra user accounts and passwords, or compromising security.
Accessing hosted and cloud services
“Geneva” extends Active Directory authentication and single sign-on to cloud-based services, hosted by Microsoft or others, so IT can securely realize the flexibility and cost savings gains of hosted applications.
Developing identity-aware applications
With the “Geneva” Framework, a developer can apply pre-built application authentication, attribute lookup and authorization for richer, more secure applications…without becoming a security expert.
Simplifying access management
IT organizations have fewer resources to manage more and more applications that have many users, run on multiple platforms and require more complex forms of security. “Geneva” empowers IT to centrally manage access to applications of various types and apply security policy in a standard way across the enterprise.
You can download beta 2 code for all three components of “Geneva:”
· The "Geneva" Server for IT professionals to transform claims and other tokens, manage user access, and enables federation.
· The "Geneva" Framework for developers to build claims-aware .NET applications.
· Windows CardSpace "Geneva” for developers to provide end users with secure online identity management.
“Geneva” is slated for release in the second half of 2009. Download the beta and let us know what you think!
AV-Comparatives.org published the May edition of its proactive/retrospective testing to measure 16 anti-virus vendors’ capability in detecting new threats. Microsoft anti-virus received one of only 3 Advanced+ ratings. Our detection rate was 60%, the second best among the participants, and we had the fewest false positive samples.
This result is consistent with some recent proactive tests conducted by other industry test organizations. In the VB100 April edition, VB introduced a new metric, Reactive and Proactive (RAP), in their test criteria. Vendors scored from 8.0% to 94.7%. Both Forefront Client Security and OneCare score at 80% in the RAP test cases. In addition, in the WildList response time testing by AV-test.org in 2008, Microsoft was in the clear leading position on proactive detection.
For details, see AV-comparatives May edition, published here.
More than 97% of all email is spam! And it is more than annoying…it also creates the ideal environment for malware attacks and phishing attempts. In response, we have recently launched the Forefront Anti-Spam Resource Center. Visit the site and add it to your favorites to stay up to date on Microsoft’s products, technologies and research to help you mitigate the risks and annoyances of spam in your company.
Below is an interesting graphic on the most common spam topics.
Related to this: Don’t miss this upcoming TechNet Webcast: How Microsoft IT uses the Exchange Hosted Services to Protect the Messaging Environment
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The U.K. Ministry of Defence (MOD) is providing secure access to 10,000 “orphaned users” who work remotely and had no means of accessing internal administrative services. MOD worked with CapGemeni and is using Microsoft identity and security solutions, such as Identity Lifecycle Manager (next version to be called Forefront Identity Manager), ISA Server (next version Forefront Threat Management Gateway) and Intelligent Application Gateway 2007.
Ministry of Defence advisor to the CIO David Longhurst says: “With all our HR services now online, there will be savings in the back office which could amount to many millions of pounds over 10 years. The savings will far outweigh the cost of the implementation.”
Enabling productivity, saving money. Sounds like Business Ready Security. Read the MOD case study here.