NEWS Microsoft plans to acquire FrontBridge Technologies, a provider of secure messaging services, taking its push into the security market a step further.
The software giant will integrate FrontBridge's corporate messaging protection with its Microsoft Exchange Server email product, Microsoft said in its announcement Wednesday. The Los Angeles-based security company's services, which include instant message archiving and spam filtering, are designed to safeguard all electronic messages and make sure they are compliant with regulatory requirements such as the Sarbanes-Oxley Act.
Dave Thompson, vice president in Microsoft's Exchange Server Group, said in a statement: "Both companies are focused on solving the same difficult messaging challenge - ensuring customers' email is compliant, better protected from spam and virus threats, and always available."
The terms of the deal were not disclosed, but the transaction is expected to close by the end of the third quarter, a Microsoft representative said.
The FrontBridge deal follows an announcement Microsoft made earlier in the day that it was investing in Finjan Software, a security company that has developed behaviour-based software to block viruses and spyware.
Dawn Kawamoto writes for News.com
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1. Michael Decker
This was a long time coming, and addresses some of the shortcomings of Exchange when organisations try to use it for compliance purposes.
The next area for them to address is archiving, and I'll bet there's cold winds blowing around the legs of the likes of KVS and other email archivers whose technology and approach relies on replacing or replicating the Exchange message store. MS could probably incorporate all this functionality in their product as part of an afternoon's work at Redmond (plus, I guess, an evening or two of bug fixing?).
True audit systems such as Cryoserver provide a separate, secured environment for regulated data such as email and IM, which gives comfort to regulators that a trashed Exchange box won't mean data loss.
There's uptime availability issues too that come from everything being in one box - next time a new virus takes down your Exchange box for a day or so, make sure that you can still access all your mail and IM records via some other system.
As well as the obvious DR benefits, forensic compliance systems that provide appropriate checks and balances means much better standards of compliance - putting everything under one MS Exchange roof means crossing your fingers and hoping it don't rain cricketball-sized hailstones one day...