Microsoft makes it official: Forefront reaches the cloud

A year and a half after the first leaks, Microsoft is acknowledging that it is taking its Forefront security products online and making them part of the growing stable of Microsoft-hosted Online services.

In anticipation of next week's RSA security conference, Microsoft is sharing news around is various enterprise security offerings. One of those announcements is the unveiling of what Microsoft is calling "Forefront Online Security for Exchange."

(It sounds like Microsoft may be planning to offer some, if not all, of its other Forefront security products in hosted form. But so far the Forefront for Exchange product is the only one the company is officially acknowledging.)

Even though it is a cloud-based offering, the Forefront Online Security for Exchange service is designed to protect on-premise inboxes from spam and malware. Will it also be able to protect Exchange Online inboxes? It  doesn't need to, claimed Doug Leland, general manager of Microsoft's Identity and Access Management Business Group. Microsoft's hosted Business Productivity Online Suite already includes Forefront-for-Exchange protection as a built-in part of that bundle of services, he said.

Pricing for the first of the Forefront Online services starts at $1.75 per user per month, according to Microsoft's Web site.  it includes as part of the accompanying service-level agreement guaranteed network uptime of 99.999% and average e-mail delivery times of less than one minute.

Meanwhile, speaking of which Microsoft software Microsoft will be bringing next to the cloud, I'm wondering whether there's a Commerce Online service coming from Microsoft in the not-too-distant future....