According to Richi Jennings, an analyst with Ferris Research, which specializes in enterprise messaging issues, Microsoft's trying to kill two birds with one stone. Not only does the company want to be seen as doing something to stem the flood of security problems enterprises have faced of late -- many of them, such as MyDoom and Sobig, delivered via e-mail -- but they see a market opportunity.
"I don't think Microsoft is doing this just to grease a squeaky [security] wheel," said Jennings.
Nor does he think that the debut of Exchange Edge Services will an end-all, be-all solution for businesses.
"Exchange is simply not built with hardened code designed to be used at the boundary, it's not designed to withstand attacks," Jennings said. "And Edge Services is not going to be competitive with existing software and appliance-based SMTP firewall products from the likes of, say, Cisco. Not in version 1.0 anyway."
The introduction of Edge Services will be most appreciated, said Jennings, by companies that strive to be 100 percent Microsoft shops. "Those companies are often the ones who say, 'it's good enough,' and are not comfortable running, for instance, Sendmail as an edge mail server." Sendmail, he went on to add, offers better protection against threats trying to breach the enterprise, but is also more difficult for many organizations to administer, since they have little expertise with the server. "That's a disaster waiting to happen."
