Confused yet? I know that I was when I first started hearing this term Forefront... Is "Forefront" just a client/server security product or something else?
Forefront simply is a name that MS is branding onto our security related products. Forefront is divided into three categories of client, server, and edge security. Within those categories there are currently a total of 5 products.
Client:
1) Forefront Client Security - Comprehensive realtime protection against viruses, malware, and spyware
Server:
2) Forefront Security for Exchange Server - helps protect your mail server against Viruses, Worms, Spam, and Inappropriate Content. This is basically the "Antigen" for exchange product lines all combind into one for Exchange.
3) Forefront Security for Sharepoint - helps protect your sharepoint server against the latest threats, inappropriate content, and disclosure of confidential information.
Edge (a.k.a. "Edge Security and Access"):
4) Internet Security & Acceleration Server (ISA) 2006 - Application layer firewall and web proxy server.
5) Internet Application Gateway (IAG) - SSL remote access gateway. This can work with or independently from ISA to provide much more granular levels of access to published resources (file shares, applications, websites, etc). The easiest way to think about IAG is if you want to give people on an unprotected network granular and secure access to an internal resource without doing a IPSec/PPTP VPN, this will do the trick.
One thing that I think deserves a better and more simple explanation is the difference between ISA 2006 and IAG. I hope to publish another blog about this in the future. Please add a comment to this blog if you'd like me to write this up to spur me on...
The forefront overview which is linked on the forefront homepage does a decent job at explaining more about the differences, so I won't get into it in any more detail. I just wanted to clear that up for anyone who wanted to quickly understand this "forefront" area that we are throwing out there.