14 DAY TRIAL // Forefront Threat Management Gateway 2010 has made a key step toward the RTM milestone, as Microsoft started offering the Release Candidate (RC) bits at the end of the past week. The RC of Forefront Threat Management Gateway 2010 is in the last major stage of the development process on the way to the release to manufacturing phase, and is currently up for grabs directly from the Microsoft Download Center. Just as was the case with the previous development release, Forefront Threat Management Gateway 2010 RC offers testers and early adopters a chance to try out the complete product ahead of finalization.
“While the Beta 3 release was feature complete and no new major features were introduced in the Release Candidate, there are several important improvements that will certainly justify the effort of upgrading your existing deployments to Forefront TMG 2010 Release Candidate. This release is all about security, reliability, performance, telemetry integration and overall solution completeness. This is our final public release prior to our RTM (release to manufacturing),” revealed Vladimir Holostov, lead program manager, release manager for Forefront TMG 2010.
According to the Redmond company, the evolution from Beta stage to RC was focused on a few critical areas of the security solution including security, reliability and performance, and telemetry. Like additional Microsoft technologies starting with Windows Vista, TGM 2010 is a product of the company’s Security Development Lifecycle, which means that the focus on securing the code was one of the top priorities of the development process.
Threat modeling, telemetry analysis, penetration and fuzz testing are only examples of the software giant’s security efforts, but Microsoft also focused on driving forward reliability and performance. According to the company, TGM has accumulated in excess of 5,000 hours in production environments via dogfooding, and is already protecting over 20,000 employees. And protection was kicked up a notch with the integration of the Microsoft Telemetry and Reputation services, which improves the response time and protection against new threats.
“Forefront TMG 2010 Release Candidate is available for downloading and you are welcome to start deploying and testing in your environment. We want to thank you for the great feedback we’ve received so far, and we are going to continue listening - at this stage we are interested in hearing about any last-minute critical issues related to security, stability and functionality specific to your environment, hardware or configuration. The team will share more about features and improvements introduced in Forefront TMG 2010 overall,” Holostov added.
The promise from Microsoft is that Forefront Threat Management Gateway 2010 will be finalized by the end of 2009. The Redmond company is already encouraging customers to deploy Forefront TGM 2010 today, and take advantage of upgrade options to the gold build once it becomes available.
Microsoft Forefront Threat Management Gateway 2010 Release Candidate (RC) is available for download here.