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 [...]
Comments Off
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 [...]
Category: Microsoft Strategic Planning Tags: Apple, Microsoft, Windows
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 [...]
Comments Off
Category: Application Security Tags: Application Security, application security testing tools, Best Practices, Maturity Models, Microsoft
by Neil MacDonald | September 24, 2010 | Comments Off
Microsoft Security Essentials (MSE) is a free consumer offering originally delivered to market in 2009 based on the same engine and anti-malware feeds that are used within Microsoft’s for-fee enterprise-oriented Forefront Endpoint Protection (FEP). I saw this announcement from Microsoft earlier in the week. From the announcement: For this reason, Microsoft is announcing that beginning [...]
Comments Off
Category: Endpoint Protection Platform Microsoft Microsoft Security Tags: Endpoint Protection Platform, Microsoft, Microsoft Security, Reducing Cost, Windows
by Neil MacDonald | September 22, 2010 | 11 Comments
Migrating from IE6 to IE8 is not easy because of legacy web-enabled applications that don’t render correctly on IE8 and vendors that are slow to officially support it. There are a variety of ways to virtualize IE6 to help with this issue, including using application virtualization tools. I originally wrote about the potential issues using [...]
Category: Microsoft Microsoft Security Virtualization Tags: Microsoft, Microsoft Security, Virtualization, Windows
by Neil MacDonald | September 10, 2010 | 1 Comment
Our mobile analysts are working on the official Gartner analysis of the announcement and I’ll link to this when it becomes available. As Gartner’s primary analyst on Microsoft, I interviewed Stephen at Gartner’s US Fall Symposium last fall. Over the past several years, I’ve gotten to know Stephen Elop pretty well. He is a great [...]
Category: General Technology Microsoft Tags: Microsoft
by Neil MacDonald | August 3, 2010 | Comments Off
Last week, Microsoft held its annual financial analyst meeting. The materials presented are available at this link. There are the things you would expect – like Microsoft talking about the success of Windows 7 and IE8. There were a couple of areas that stood out: 1) Microsoft’s Chief Operating Officer, Kevin Turner, explained that Microsoft’s [...]
Comments Off
Category: Cloud General Technology Next-generation Data Center Windows 7 Tags: Cloud Security, Microsoft, Microsoft Security, Windows
by Neil MacDonald | April 1, 2010 | Comments Off
One of the constant recommendations in my research is to reduce your exposure to malware by running more users as standard user. I’ve talked about this issue here, here and here. There are several possible approaches to help here. Microsoft’s User Account Control in Windows Vista and Windows 7 is an approach, but suffers from [...]
Comments Off
Category: Endpoint Protection Platform Information Security Tags: Best Practices, Endpoint Protection Platform, Lockdown, Microsoft, Microsoft Security, Security No-Brainer, Windows
by Neil MacDonald | March 26, 2010 | 1 Comment
Microsoft recently held its 2010 MIX conference for web developers in the US. As expected, there was a significant focus on Silverlight, the Windows Phone platform and IE9. An unexpected and welcome surprise was the number of sessions designed to get developers thinking about security and privacy in their applications. Check this out (the sessions [...]
Category: Application Security Tags: Application Security, Microsoft, Microsoft Security
by Neil MacDonald | March 10, 2010 | Comments Off
After yesterday’s patch Tuesday release, Microsoft also released this security bulletin affecting IE6 and IE7 (but not IE8). Similar zero day attacks on IE6 made headlines earlier this year when Google and other organizations were attacked and intellectual property stolen. With this latest zero-day, Microsoft reports that targeted attacks have been observed in the wild. [...]
Comments Off
Category: Application Security Endpoint Protection Platform Information Security Microsoft Security Tags: Browser Security, Microsoft, Microsoft Security, Windows
