Neil MacDonald

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Entries Tagged as 'Microsoft'


Windows 8 Raises the Bar for Security

by Neil MacDonald  |  September 28, 2011  |  1 Comment

I’ve been out the past two weeks visiting with clients and have been meaning to summarize my impression of the upcoming Windows 8 (expected mid 2012) from a security point of view. I attended Microsoft’s recent BUILD conference for developers where Windows 8 made its first official appearance. You can see my real-time tweets and [...]

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Category: Beyond Anti-Virus Information Security Microsoft Security Windows 7     Tags: , , , , , , ,

Microsoft’s Forefront Endpoint Protection – Is it “Good Enough”?

by Neil MacDonald  |  August 4, 2011  |  Comments Off

Licensing changes for Microsoft’s enterprise endpoint antimalware protection solution that were announced in March at Microsoft’s MMS conference take affect this month. If you are licensed under Microsoft’s Core Client Access License program, it now includes CALs for Forefront Endpoint Protection. For many organizations that are already licensed under Core CAL, this means that FEP [...]

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Category: Endpoint Protection Platform Microsoft Microsoft Security Windows 7     Tags: , , , ,

Observations from Microsoft’s Management Summit

by Neil MacDonald  |  March 22, 2011  |  Comments Off

I’ve spent the past day and a half attending Microsoft’s Management Summit in Las Vegas. From my perspective the announcement that will affect the most enterprises from a security perspective was a change in licensing related to Forefront. Some history — in 2010, Microsoft reorganized the Server and Tools Business Unit placing the Forefront Endpoint [...]

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Category: Cloud Cloud Security Endpoint Protection Platform Microsoft Microsoft Security Next-generation Data Center Virtualization Virtualization Security     Tags: , , , , , , , ,

Is Microsoft’s Secure Development Lifecycle Losing Its Effectiveness?

by Neil MacDonald  |  March 7, 2011  |  4 Comments

I was performing some background research on the number and severity of vulnerabilities produced by Apple, Microsoft and other vendors when I ran across something quite interesting. (BTW – I was researching the issue addressed in this research note for clients — whether or not antimalware software is recommended for enterprise Apple Macintosh endpoints.) Microsoft, like [...]

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Category: Application Security Information Security Microsoft Security Windows 7     Tags: , , , , ,

Identifying Browsers and Plugins That Might Represent a Risk

by Neil MacDonald  |  January 21, 2011  |  Comments Off

In my kick off post for 2011, I talked about the need for IT to expand the depth and breadth of patching. In the follow-on post, I talked about the need to migrate more users to run with standard user (and not administrative level) privileges. One of the challenges to both of these actions is [...]

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Category: Application Security Information Security Microsoft Microsoft Security Windows 7     Tags: , , , , , ,

Is Windows Losing Market Share?

by Neil MacDonald  |  October 28, 2010  |  4 Comments

During our interview last week with Steve Ballmer, one point of contention was whether or not Windows was losing market share. The context of the question was a discussion on consumerization and its impact on enterprises. What our clients are telling us is that there are an increasing number of Macs being brought into the [...]

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Category: Microsoft Virtualization Security Windows 7     Tags: , , ,

Ray Ozzie’s Last Memo

by Neil MacDonald  |  October 26, 2010  |  1 Comment

In 2005, Ray Ozzie penned his famous memo in which he laid out the challenge for Microsoft as it entered the era of cloud-based services. I interviewed Ray Ozzie to discuss Microsoft’s cloud strategy in detail in this 2009 Gartner research document. Last week, Ray Ozzie announced he was leaving Microsoft. Yesterday, Ray’s last memo [...]

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Category: Cloud Microsoft Windows 7     Tags: , ,

Symposium Mastermind with Steve Ballmer

by Neil MacDonald  |  October 25, 2010  |  Comments Off

On the final day of Gartner’s US Fall Symposium, my colleague John Pescatore and I interviewed Steve Ballmer on the main stage. You can catch a clip of the interview here. One of of questions we asked concerned a version of Microsoft’s “tablet” form factor that Steve had indicated that such a device would be [...]

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Category: Microsoft Windows 7     Tags: ,

What Would You Ask Steve Ballmer?

by Neil MacDonald  |  October 5, 2010  |  4 Comments

Yesterday, there was quite a bit of buzz about Microsoft after a Goldman Sachs analyst downgraded Microsoft from “Buy” to “Neutral” and lowered their target share price by US $4. As reported in the article, the analyst highlighted Microsoft’s continued weakness in the mobile and tablet space as factors in the downgrade. Microsoft’s future is [...]

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Category: Microsoft Strategic Planning     Tags: , ,

Building a Software Assurance Program

by Neil MacDonald  |  September 28, 2010  |  Comments Off

I work with clients daily on how to change their development (and procurement) processes to product more secure code. I wrote in this blog, that application security cannot be solved with technology alone, yet I still run into organizations trying to solve their application security problems with the purchase of a static or dynamic application [...]

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Category: Application Security     Tags: , , , ,