News
Microsoft Describes Its Own Security Measures
- By Scott Bekker
- December 01, 2003
Microsoft published a white paper on its Web site last week giving an overview of its internal security measures.
While Microsoft's security is not perfect, and there have been highly publicized compromises of the company's network and Web sites, there are few IT organizations in charge of securing major enterprises that have more familiarity with the products they deploy than the Microsoft Operations and Technology Group.
In addition to supporting the IT operations of Microsoft, a Fortune 500 company, OTG also is tasked with being one of the earliest and most thorough testers of Microsoft technologies.
The 29-page technical whitepaper, "Security at Microsoft," is a description of the framework Microsoft OTG put in place and that helps defend the high-profile company against approximately 100,000 intrusion attempts per month.
The document is not a procedural guide like the very specific instruction sets Microsoft provides for secure configuration of Windows 2000 Server, Windows Server 2003 and Exchange 2000 Server. Instead, the document lays out the design principles the company built its security model around and discusses a few specifics for reaching them.
Most of the infrastructural descriptions in "Security at Microsoft" involve the use of Windows Server 2003. But the company contends that the underlying principles were set in the Windows 2000 timeframe and were originally implemented on that older platform.
The white paper is available at:
www.microsoft.com/technet/itsolutions/MSIT/Security/mssecbp.asp
About the Author
Scott Bekker is editor in chief of Redmond Channel Partner magazine.