Microsoft ISA Server 2006 Support

For small and medium sized  businesses in Arizona, Colorado, Southern Nevada, Southern California and nationwide, Decision Consultants’ Microsoft Gold-certified consultants offer network support and IT consulting expertise for the complete line of Microsoft  Server, and Microsoft applications. Decision Consultants’ integration, management, support, and custom programming offerings include system planning, configuration, and deployment.

Decision Consultants can provide project support on-site and remotely, Help Desk Support, security planning and complete IT management.

Microsoft ISA Server 2006

ISA Server 2006 is Microsoft's advanced application-layer firewall, VPN, proxy, and Web cache platform that increases network performance while improving the protection of small business and enterprise networks against attacks from external and inside sources.

Microsoft has designed ISA Server 2006 to be the premiere solution for businesses to implement secure application publishing, efficient branch office gateways, and comprehensive web access protection. Secure Application Publishing with ISA Server 2006 enables greater control over intranet resources, yet provides increased productivity by making them available to remote users. ISA Server 2006 helps protect your corporate applications, services and data across all network layers with stateful packet inspection, application-layer filtering and comprehensive publishing tools. As a Branch Office Gateway, ISA Server 2006 simplifies administrator and user experiences through a unified firewall and VPN architecture, with web caching and bandwidth management, an optimized firewall and filtering engine, and comprehensive access control. ISA Server 2006 helps provide Web Access Protection with a hybrid proxy-firewall architecture, granular policies, deep content inspection, comprehensive alerts and monitoring capabilities.

ISA Server 2006 Architecture

The architecture of ISA Server 2006, detailed in the above illustration, provides best-of-breed efficiency.

• The core firewall engine operates in efficient kernel mode and integrates with the TCP/IP stack.

• The policy engine retrieves ISA Server policies from the policy store, and enforces them both in kernel mode, as part of the firewall engine, and in user mode, where the Microsoft Firewall service performs advanced functions, such as user authentication.

• An application filter API allows included protocol filters and third-party protocol filters to provide advanced services that integrate with ISA Server. The SMTP filter is an example of such a protocol filter.

• The Web Proxy Filter processes HTTP requests and performs application filtering on these requests. A Web filter API allows third-party Web filters to plug into the Web Proxy Filter for more advanced HTTP processing.

New Features and Benefits of Microsoft ISA Server 2006

ISA Server 2006 offers a wealth of new features and benefits that provide more tightly integrated network security, easier management, higher performance, and better protection for business information and applications.

Integrated Security

Microsoft ISA Server 2006 offers improved security through tight integration with applications and with Microsoft infrastructure such as Active Directory, Windows Internet Name Service (WINS), Dynamic Host Configuration Protocol (DHCP), NLB, and VPN Quarantine. Improvements in this area allow your business to:

• Increase security and deployment flexibility for Web application servers through enhanced multi-factor authentication (smart cards and one-time passwords), flexible integration with Active Directory (LDAP), and customizable forms-based authentication for almost any Web application and client device.

• Easily integrate ISA Server with your existing authentication infrastructure through enhanced authentication delegation (including NTLM, Kerberos, and SecurID), and gain more access control with improved session management that detects non-user traffic through automatic idle-based time-outs.

• Maintain secure branch office infrastructure using Background Intelligent Transfer Service (BITS) caching to accelerate the deployment of software updates and keep remote computers protected.

• Help defend your network with Enhanced Flood Resiliency features for event handling and monitoring that provide better resistance to denial of service and distributed denial of service attacks.

• Mitigate the effects infected computers have on your network with enhanced worm resiliency through simplified client Internet Protocol (IP) alert pooling and connection quotas.

• Enhance attack remediation through comprehensive alert triggers and responses to quickly notify administrators of network problems.

Easier Management

Total Cost of Ownership of application-layer security can be reduced significantly by ISA Server 2006 through simplified deployment and management, cost, and server consolidation. ISA Server 2006 saves your company money by allowing IT managers to:

• Simplify the process of securely publishing Exchange, Windows SharePoint Services, and other Web servers with easy-to-use wizards for multiple sites, and enhanced certificate administration to avoid configuration errors.

• Easily deploy entire farms of Web servers behind ISA Server using session-based and IP-based affinity with automatic out-of-service detection using Web Publishing Load Balancing.

• Easily deploy and configure ISA Server computers in branch offices by using answer files on removable media for unattended installation, and with easy-to-use VPN wizards to streamline connectivity.

• Manage remote ISA Server computers more effectively with faster propagation of enterprise policies, reduced server requirements, and low-bandwidth optimizations.

• Provide enhanced resource control by log throttling and control of memory consumption and pending DNS queries.

• Unify management and monitoring across your ISA Server infrastructure with the Management Pack for Microsoft Operations Manager, and use enterprise-level and array-level policies to easily control security and access rules across your organization.

Faster and More Secure Access

ISA Server 2006 offers secure and seamless user access to network resources with added speed achieved through caching. Deploying ISA Server will:

• Enable a smoother user experience for published Web applications, document libraries, and content through single sign on and comprehensive link translation to help ensure secure and consistent access.

• Improve Web page load times and reduce WAN costs for users in branch offices with HTTP traffic compression and caching.

• Help ensure that the highest priority applications get precedence over other network traffic through Diffserv IP settings, providing better bandwidth utilization and response times for critical Web resources.

How Decision Consultants’ Microsoft-certified Consultants Can Help You with ISA Server 2006

Decision Consultants’ certified ISA Server 2006 experts can assist you to design, deploy, and manage a configuration of ISA Server 2006 on your network that provides the firewall security, performance and ease-of-use that your business needs.

Decision Consultants’ CISM and CISA-certified security engineers can show you how to create a complete security plan that incorporates industry best-practices for corporate-wide policies and that integrates other Microsoft products including Exchange 2010 for protected email solutions Microsoft Operations Manager for network monitoring, automated warnings and remediation, and reports. Decision Consultants’ group of Cisco Certified Consultants can provide expertise in architecting and maintaining a protected network infrastructure with Cisco network appliances such as PIX and ASA firewalls.

Decision Consultants offers a range of cost-effective information technology services to fit your network environment and budget. Services available from Decision Consultants include emergency troubleshooting, high-end consulting, project management for major migrations and upgrades, onsite and remote support, Help Desk, and comprehensive IT outsourcing.

For more information about Decision Consultants’ consulting and support services for ISA Server 2006, call (866) 666-7311 or send email to This e-mail address is being protected from spambots. You need JavaScript enabled to view it