Microsoft delays Stirling security suite until late 2009/early 2010
Microsoft had been planning to deliver its integrated security suite, codenamed "Stirling" in the first half of this year. On April 3, company officials admitted that Stirling, instead, will begin rolling out very late this year, with substantial components not coming until early 2010.
Microsoft made the admission via the Forefront Team Blog. The team attributed the slip in Stirling's schedule to two primary factors: Customer requests for interoperability between Stirling and third-party security products, as well as to a desire to incorporate a new zero-day attack-prevention technology, Dynamic Signature Service, into the Stirling suite. From the team's post:
"One of the top customer requests was adding interoperability with third party security solutions. In response, we plan to increase our focus on one of the unique features of “Stirling”, Security Assessment Sharing (SAS.) SAS correlates security events from different Forefront products and third party solutions, enabling administrators to quickly investigate and remediate security events. We will provide information about interoperability partners in the near future.
"Additionally, we are investing significantly in a behavior-based technology called Dynamic Signature Service to help deliver more comprehensive endpoint protection for zero day attacks. This will complement the 'Stirling' suite's advanced heuristics, dynamic translation and real time application scanning for kernel level malware with a sophisticated approach to on-demand threat mitigation."
Microsoft shipped a first public beta build of Stirling in March 2008.
Stirling is a bundle of Forefront Client Security, Forefront Security for Exchange Server, Forefront Security for SharePoint and the next generation of Microsoft Internet Security and Acceleration Server (ISA Server) — which Microsoft is renaming Forefront Threat Management Gateway — plus a unified management console.
In the April 3 blog post, Microsoft officials admitted that the management console, Forefront Client Security 2.0 and Forefront Security for SharePoint components will be released in the first half of 2010. The rest of the suite will begin rolling out in the fourth quarter of 2009, the Softies said.