Business reasons to protect SharePoint

Recently, our Forefront Protection 2010 for SharePoint (FPSP) product was released so I thought I’d take the opportunity to explain, in my own terms, the business value for the product.  I also interviewed Noreen from the product team to get her take on the product as well as give us some demos of FPSP in action (viewable at bottom of this post).

Defense in Depth 
Especially considering how important SharePoint is to your business, you should have a defense in depth strategy which includes SharePoint.  How much employee time or money would your company lose if someone uploaded a virus on SharePoint bringing it down or compromised the data?  There are two significant unique features in FPSP that help your defense-in-depth strategy which I’d like to highlight:

• Multi-Engine Anti-Virus – The statistics are irrefutable, having multiple anti-virus engines has the highest detection rate.  Every company’s client anti-virus software, including Microsoft’s Forefront Client Security, utilize only a single engine.  Furthermore, if you rely only on your client anti-malware software and it does detect a virus on the SharePoint server itself, the user experience will more than likely be poor causing a loss of productivity time. 
  Side note: multi-engine AV is also available in Forefront Protection 2010 for Exchange.
• Interoperability with Rights-Management-Services (RMS) – RMS is an excellent addition to your defense in depth strategy, protecting the documents themselves.  FPSP still has all of the same protection capabilities even with RMS-protected documents.

More control and visibility over your data 
With a continued expansion of the amount of data inside your environment, the time to filter this data or cost to increase storage capacity can be significant.  The data keyword & file filtering give you control over what type of data you allow on the SharePoint server and provide reporting on what type of files are present.   This could save costs through not requiring additional storage capacity or helping to prevent data leaks.  For instance, if you have a publicly-accessible SharePoint server in your company you could enable keyword file-filtering to prevent anything with the words “confidential" or “internal only” inside the files, even specifying the threshold of how many times these words show up before you disallow them from being posted.

To download this video in various formats such as Zune, iPod, WMV, or MP3, please visit the original post.