I Can See Clearly Now the Firewall is On...

Thanks to a posting by my hall-mate and fellow SBTU'er Jeff Jones, I'm trying out the beta of Windows Live Writer for this blog entry.  What's neat is it looks like Office OneNote (which I use to write most of my posts to begin with), but it can publish right to my blog. 

Moving on.

We've just published a new technical whitepaper that drills down on the new Windows Firewall with Advanced Security in Windows Vista and Windows Server "Longhorn".  As you'll likely recall, this new firewall offerings a bunch of enhancements and new features.  Two big ones: 1) outbound filtering and 2) the integration with IPsec.

The long and the short of it is this improved and advanced host firewall (which is manageable via Group Policy) will help make your environment even more secure, reduce attack surface area and adopt very cool networking solutions like Network Access Protection and Server and Domain Isolation.

Here's the link to the whitepaper:

Introduction to Windows Firewall with Advanced Security

So, here's a funny bit of insider info.  When I first joined the Windows Server team from the SBTU, the gang was working on names for what was called (at the time) the "Authenticating Firewall".  There were a number of names that came back from the "process" which included the (wait for it!) "Windows Firewall with Network Security".  Yup, talk about stating the obvious <g>