In the least year, Microsoft has experienced a strong demand for security solutions from its Forefront line. According to Margaret Arakawa, senior director of Security & Access Product Marketing at Microsoft, Forefront products have cumulated in the past 12 months alone in excess of 1.2 million downloads, counting the trial versions exclusively. With Forefront, Microsoft has taken on the ambitious task of delivering security designed to cover the whole network infrastructure, while at the same time coming with remote access, and client, server and application protection capabilities.

"We've seen significant demand from customers across the complete product portfolio, from client to server to network edge security. On the application server side, customer adoption is really accelerating with organizations worldwide. We're now protecting more than 20 percent of Exchange on-premise mailboxes with Forefront Security for Exchange Server. On the collaboration server side, Microsoft has seen tremendous customer demand for our Microsoft Office SharePoint Server solution," Arakawa stated.

Since the introduction of the Forefront umbrella brand, a total of five products were made available by Microsoft including Forefront Security for SharePoint, Forefront Security for Exchange Server, Intelligent Application Gateway 2007, Forefront Client Security and the Forefront Server Security Management Console. The Console is positioned as a management solution offering centralization and onsite and remote administration of the Forefront products set up to protect messaging and collaboration environments. Arakawa explained that the Console is entirely web-based.

"It's a Web-based tool that helps businesses centrally manage, configure, report on and update multiple deployments of Forefront Security for Exchange Server, Forefront Security for SharePoint, as well as Microsoft Antigen products. Today's launch represents Microsoft's continued progress on our long-term integrated security and management strategy and roadmap that we laid out for customers earlier this year", Arakawa stated.