Editor’s Note: Shades of Security

Lafe Low

Regardless of a lackluster economy, budget cuts or any other financial land mines, security is one area that rarely gets cut. You still need to secure your corporate network, your myriad network endpoints and the crown jewels—your corporate data. There have been enough high-profile headlines to make anyone leery of becoming the next one—whether inadvertent blunders like lost government laptops or malicious theft like TJX (whose primary perpetrator incidentally just received a hefty 20-year sentence).

Security is woven into nearly every level of application or OS, from tools like Microsoft System Center Data Protection Manager to Microsoft Forefront. As the threat landscape evolves, so too do the security features and functions designed to defeat the latest virus or hacking technique. We start this month giving you an overview and insider’s view of the security features and functions of Windows 7 and how best to deploy SharePoint in as secure a fashion as possible.

Windows 7 has numerous security enhancements, including updates to focused tools like Data Execution Prevention and BitLocker Drive Encryption, as well as increased security through Windows Firewall and the virtualization tools. In the future, we’ll expand our security coverage out through the application layer to the file level, network endpoints and mobile devices. For SharePoint, we’ll load you up with configuration and usage tips to keep content on your SharePoint sites secure.

Greetings and Welcome to the 'New' TechNet Magazine

TechNet Magazine is on a journey—we’ve recently gone from a print publication to an online-only publication, at your requests we’ve added the option for you to print the whole issue as a PDF, but what else can we do to enhance your experience, whether for your reading convenience or specific areas of Microsoft technology coverage?

Let us know what you think. Feel free to visit our LinkedIn group, send us an e-mail at tnmag@microsoft.com, or e-mail me directly at the address listed below. I look forward to hearing from you.

Lafe Low* is the editor in chief of* TechNet Magazine*. A veteran technology journalist, he is also the former executive editor of 1105 Media's *Redmond magazine. Contact him by e-mail at llow@1105media.com.