A raft of security features in Microsoft Vista will help many consumers become "secure enough", but for businesses they aren't going to be the improvements which drive sales -- and nor do they deserve to be, according to some experts.
Among more than a dozen security features within Vista are improvements; such as the malicious software removal tool, smart card and log-on authentication changes, user access controls, USB device controls, Windows defender and Windows firewall.
But none of these, even in combination, should be seen as a panacea. The need for a layered approach to security remains as critical as ever.
Stuart Okin, security partner at Accenture and former UK head of security at Microsoft, told ZDNet Australia sister site silicon.com: "As I see it there are 15 security features in Vista and none of them are this great panacea where if you install them the world will be OK.
"Security is about layers and you need to take a layered approach to security."
Of course that's nothing new but it's a message which will need to be repeated time and time again, especially to protect consumers from an over-reliance upon Vista's security features.
The net effect for consumers will undoubtedly be an improvement however. Okin said: "From a consumer point of view I think the biggest improvements are going to be around user-access controls and Internet Explorer.
"The downside is they are going to be prompted a lot more but if people and the wider industry get a sense that this is a more secure environment then I think that will have the biggest impact from a positive point of view."
It's those prompts which raise some questions among security experts about a perennial trade-off between security and usability. To what degree would Microsoft ever risk making an operating system less user-friendly in order to make it more secure?
Peter Wood, a penetration tester -- or ethical hacker -- from First Base Technologies, suggests the Redmond giant has made promising strides in answering this question.
He said: "If Microsoft wants to make a more secure OS then they need to weight the balance between usability and security more in favour of security and I believe they have done that by making more things turned on as default than turned off."
And the early impressions of Vista is that consumers, willing to leave features disabled and work with increased prompts and pop-up warnings, will be safer.
Jay Heiser, research vice president at Gartner, said: "For the end user, Vista is definitely a net benefit. Although Vista apparently exceeds expectations for robustness, which is a welcome surprise for everyone, my personal feeling is that Vista represents a much higher relative improvement for end users and small business than it does for the enterprise.
"Vista should be a much more robust environment for safe use by inexperienced, unsupported people on the internet."
But Vista was always going to sell to consumers from day one -- it's a given -- yet it is no doubt a hope within Microsoft that this greater emphasis on security will also help add greater enterprise sales.
Gartner's Heiser isn't convinced. "Many enterprises are experiencing a very acceptable level of security failure today, without Vista," he said of the fact businesses have been raised on an expectation to need to secure past Microsoft operating systems and are seeing a growing trend towards risk-based security.
However, Accenture's Okin said being able to simplify those very expensive security architectures -- while maintaining strong layers -- will appeal to many enterprises. And he adds there are a number of features which businesses will see the sense in bringing within their ever extending perimeter.
Okin said: "From a business perspective I think the one feature which will have the biggest social change will be the new architecture around log-ons and smart card authentication. For the first time ever it will be really very simple for applications to call upon smart card or biometric authentication."
Currently half of Accenture's security business is done around identity and access management -- largely at the back-end -- and, as such, Okin is confident his former bosses have hit something of a sweet spot with this feature in particular.
He said: "Over the next few years you're going to seeing the first apps which will find it very easy to say 'OK, you need your biometric authentication now or your smart card' whether it's online banking or ecommerce or anything else.
"Up until now it has been expensive and difficult to do, and as long as it is expensive and difficult people will find a reason why they don't want to do it."
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