The IT Infrastructure Threat Modeling Guide is now available. Organizations today face an increasing number of threats to their computing environments. You need a proactive approach to assist you in your efforts to protect your organization's assets and sensitive information. This guide provides an...

The new Hyper-V Security Guide has been released. It provides methods and best practices to strengthen the security of computers running the Hyper-V role on Windows Server® 2008. The guide covers the following three topics: Hardening Hyper-V We provide you with prescriptive guidance for hardening...

The benefits of virtualization are more evident than ever. Microsoft Hyper-V™ technology allows consolidation of workloads that are currently spread across multiple underutilized servers onto a smaller number of servers. This capability provides you with a way to reduce costs through lower hardware,...

Solution Accelerators Security site has a new face, you should check it out. The Solution Accelerators Techcenter for Security was published recently to help better navigate the security Solutions Accelerators. The library contains a vast array of Accelerators addressing issues in response management...

More social networking solutions are available today than ever. As a user of two of the technologies, Linkedin and Facebook, I think both provide great capabilities and both are limited. For example, Linkedin provides capabilities for maintaining a professional profile, while Facebook provides great...

The DCM feature supports a powerful way for data discovery by using scripting. By invoking AccessChk.exe from DCM scripts, the output of user rights assignment data from AccessChk.exe can be collected by the DCM scripting data discovery provider. The following procedure enables you to use Microsoft Visual...

Folks, we need your help! If you're interested in contributing to our efforts to provide the best Solution Accelerators for Compliance, read on. Generally, organizations that need to comply with regulations such as SOX and PCI DSS use a variety of disparate commercial and internally developed practices...

Are your PC's antivirus (AV) and antispyware or anti-malware (AM) programs actually running? If anything should keep you up at night, it's the question of whether your users' desktops and laptops are protected from malware. Previously we talked about how NAP can provide a defense-in-depth...

In my last blog I introduced a new Solution Accelerator called the Security Compliance Management toolkit. Today I'd like to help you learn more about this new Accelerator, but in a somewhat indirect way—by discussing a problem space known as configuration drift. Probably the simplest way to understand...

If you have not heard yet, Solution Accelerators has released a great new toolkit!. Microsoft has created the Security Compliance Management toolkit. The toolkit provides best practices from Microsoft about how to plan, deploy, and monitor a security baseline. In addition, the toolkit provides...

In the Solution Accelerators – Security and Compliance (SA-SC) team our intention is to provide customers with the ability to easily adopt Microsoft technologies to create solutions. The idea might sound like a marketing ploy, but the truth is that we DO work hard to make Act Faster, Go Further a meaningful...

Our final Solution Accelerator story is about Napera, a company that provided an interesting twist to the Microsoft Forefront Integration Kit for NAP: a simple-to-use NAP appliance. Napera focuses on organizations with a need for a simple defense-in-depth solution that provides protection against unauthorized...

NAP provides several key benefits to an organization's defense-in-depth model. One of these benefits is showcased in our next customer story about using the Microsoft Forefront Integration Kit for NAP. Alex at Ball State University has been a key NAP partner during the development of the...

Windows Server 2008 introduced a new PC protection technology that provides administrators an answer to a complex problem: How do you make sure that computers that use network resources are healthy? Network Access Protection (NAP) was engineered to provide an answer to this problem. For a more detailed...

I would like to announce the beta release for the Microsoft® Forefront™ Integration Kit for Network Access Protection. We are making this beta release available so that we can get your feedback. With your help, we can ensure that the Kit meets your needs. What is the Microsoft Forefront Integration...

As a member of the Solution Accelerators - Security and Compliance (SA-SC) team, I’d like to share an observation and ask for some feedback from our readers. The current top 10 SAs (Solution Accelerators) are: Business Desktop Deployment 2007 Windows Vista Hardware Assessment Windows...