Gartner Breaking through the address bar

You may not have heard of Microsoft’s System Center 2012 Endpoint Protection anti-virus product, most likely because until October 2011 it was known as Microsoft Forefront Endpoint Protection 2010.

The name change is significant because Forefront is Microsoft’s enterprise security product brand, but Microsoft now considers anti-virus to be a part of systems management. Endpoint Protection is now one of the components included in both the Standard and Data Center editions of its System Center 2012 management suite, and Microsoft has attempted to integrate Endpoint Protection with System Center Configuration Manager to make anti-virus protection easier to deploy and manage.

The Good: Centralization

The thinking behind offering the product through Microsoft System Center 2012 is that endpoint protection becomes just another application to centrally deploy and manage, rather than needing to run an enterprise endpoint protection vendor’s management console to deploy and manage anti-virus measures. “The convergence of client management and security eliminates the expense of purchasing and maintaining separate solutions,” Microsoft explained. “The shared infrastructure also provides the enterprise-scale performance of Configuration Manager, making deployment and configuration faster and easier for even the largest organizations.”

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