Microsoft's campaign to place security front and center of its business is poised to take off in Australia.
Microsoft Australia's security team leader, Ben English, said the company was kicking off a range of initiatives next week--just a day after Chairman Bill Gates announced a raft of initiatives at a security company conference in San Francisco.
The initiatives include a series of seminars on security. Part of that is a push to train its security consultants to give customers a packaged service that addresses problems such as patch management and system hardening, an audit of corporate customers to establish their risk profiles, and the introduction of an internal security mobilization team. English said that the establishment of the internal team--whose members come from across the company's business lines--was designed to ensure the company as a whole took responsibility for security. "We're trying to encourage people from all aspects of the business to coordinate security strategy," he said.
The move comes as the company gears up for a series of one-day seminars on security, to run in Australian cities March 1 to 18. The seminars, which focus particularly on patch management and techniques for hardening corporate platforms to minimize the risk of breaches, are designed for developers and information technology professionals. Speakers include Microsoft's director of security, George Stathakopoulos. To date, Microsoft has recorded more than 7,000 registrations across Australia, with more than 1,000 registered for each of the seminars in Sydney, Melbourne and Brisbane.
News source: C|net
