John Pescatore

It used to be security mantra not to use a Windows operating system until Service Pack 2 came out. That was never great advice – I used to advise Gartner clients to focus on the types and severity of bugs coming out in Windows vs. any hard coded event like a Service Pack release to determine security maturity . But SP2 has always been sort of a “OK, that Windows OS is pretty mature right about now” milestone.

That’s why it seems kind of shocking that eWeek and others are reporting that SP2 for Windows Vista will be coming out soon! When I saw that I thought “Wow, it is early for SP2 on Windows 7” and then I realized it was Vista they were talking about. Seems like all the MSFT noise and the press coverage is on Windows 7 and most of us have forgotten all about Vista.

All those security advancements like UAC, Microsoft Network Access Protection and Server and Domain Isolation that Microsoft pushed as major reasons to move to Vista didn’t really stick, but versions of them are back in Windows 7: UAC has been tweaked to be less intrusive and SADI has been renamed Direct Access but we haven’t heard a peep about MNAP.

If your company is going to make the jump from XP to Windows 7, take advantage of that transition to make some security increases in desktop security and the ability to make NAC easier to deploy. The fact that XP is more than seven years old pretty much guarantees you will be forced off it soon – or will global economic disaster mean that the immovable budget object will be able to resist the irrestible force?

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