NEW YORK—Microsoft Corp. isnt veering from its well-documented security course.
That message rang loud and clear, as the Redmond, Wash., software giant officially kicked off its 20-city Security Summit tour here on Tuesday morning.
“The idea of these summits is to give you the information you need to have a great experience around security, without having to suffer through bad experiences,” said Mike Nash, corporate vice president in charge of Microsofts security and business technology group, who delivered the opening summit keynote.
Microsoft provided the few hundred Security Summit attendees a choice of a developer track or an IT Professional track. Attendees received a free “Microsoft Security Guidance Kit,” with CD and DVD versions of tools for assessing security and developing corporate security policies and guidelines. Microsoft also provided attendees with a copy of the Beta 2 release of the Internet Security and Acceleration (ISA) 2004 firewall.
Nash highlighted the commitment made last fall by CEO Steve Ballmer to “reach, train and educate in security over 500,000 people within the next 12 months Microsoft is on track to reach this goal by the end of calendar 2004.
Nash reiterated the same security messages that Microsoft executives—from Chairman Bill Gates on down—have been emphasizing for the past several months.
Customers want to reduce their security risks by assessing their environments; improving isolation and resiliency; and developing and implementing controls, he said. At the same time, Nash noted, customers want to continue to further automate their businesses by connecting with customers, integrating with partners and building self-service applications. But they only want to do so if it doesnt entail greater security risks.
Nash said Microsoft would deliver a much-enhanced security experience for Windows users this summer, when it ships Windows XP Service Pack 2 (SP2) is set to include new and more stringent firewall, e-mail, instant-messaging, web-browsing and memory-management controls.
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