MATT SCHEROCMAN
Vice president of consulting services at PCMS IT Advisor, a Cincinnati-based Microsoft Gold partner
Security improvements are significant in Windows Server 2008. Network Access Protection being built into the server core is definitely going to benefit VARs selling into the midmarket and SMB. NAP makes sense for these customers because it eliminates the need to deploy a third party network access control solution and the cost of integrating it.
NAP is going to drive services for VARs because what has typically delayed the SMB market getting into network access control is the cost of bringing in third party vendors' solutions. NAP is a free product comes with Windows Server 2008, and smaller companies are going to be more than willing to pay for the services to drive that.
On the other side, when you look at large multinational corporations, the ability to have read-only domain controllers in their remote locations and secure them with Bitlocker is going to be huge. With Windows Server 2008, you can assign access down so that remote office locations only have access to the information they need. And if someone walks away with server, at least they won't be able to get the data.
