Microsoft Adds Two Business Security Offerings

Microsoft Corp. bolstered its business security portfolio with the addition of two endpoint security solutions, the Forefront Threat Management Gateway 2010 (TMG) and the Forefront Unified Access Gateway 2010 (UAG).

The Forefront TMG solution is aimed at providing a safe web browsing environment for business employees. It supplies URL filtering, anti-malware inspection, intrusion prevention, application and network-layer firewall and http/https checks. It is integrated with core network protection features such as firewall and VPN.

Microsoft said that the Forefront TMG product is available now for evaluation and purchase. It includes two separately licensed parts: Pricing for the TMG standard edition starts at $1,499 per processor. Pricing for the web protection service is $12 per user or device annually.

The Forefront TMG solution, built on its predecessor ISA Server 2006, also uses Microsoft’s Reputation Services, a new, cloud-based database of some 45 million web domains representing what the vendor said is billions of web pages, to help business customers dodge malicious sites.

“Microsoft Reputation Services is a new service that is helping to provide a better level of web security to end users,” said Bill Jensen, Microsoft TMG product manager in an online interview.

“It does this by providing a much richer and deeper set of information on what’s a good web site and what’s a bad web site,” he said.

The Forefront UAG solution safeguards secure remote access to corporate resources for business users. It is aimed at companies with remote employees tying into the corporate network through managed and unmanaged PCs and mobile devices.

It supports Windows DirectAccess, a feature of Windows 7 and Windows Server 2008 R2 that enables remote workers to seamlessly and securely connect to the Internet without a VPN.

UAG will be offered starting later this month.