One of the apparent out comes from the series of layoffs that have happened at Microsoft, with the most recent occurring last week, was the news we all heard that the Trustworthy Computing team would be rolled into other areas of the company.
Yesterday Scott Charney, the Corporate Vice President of Trustworthy Computing, took to the Microsoft Cyber Trust blog to share details of what is changing yet remaining the same as the team transitions.
When Bill Gates announced the Trustworthy Computing Initiative in 2002, he recognized that we needed to change both our processes and culture if we were to make fundamental changes in our products. To ensure that occurred, a centralized group was given responsibility to drive the initiative forward. At the 10 year milestone in 2012, a decade of progress was noted in a number of ways; a chief one being the existence of numerous specialists and practices in place throughout the company. Today, every group at Microsoft has embraced these issues and continues to innovate in security, privacy, and reliability.
Charney goes on to say that Trustworthy Computing continues to be a very important and critical piece of Microsoft commitment to protect customers.
By consolidating work within the company, as well as altering some reporting structures, Microsoft will be able to make a number of trust-related decisions more quickly and execute plans with greater speed, whether the objective is to get innovations into the hands of our customers, improve our engineering systems, ensure compliance with legal or corporate policies, or engage with regulators around the world.
Charney wrote that he will still be the leader of Trustworthy Computing as they move in under the Cloud and Enterprise Division and they will still be responsible for company wide programs such as the Security Development Lifecycle and Online Security Awareness.
He indicated that the team would also be more heavily involved in the engineering aspect of the future of cloud security.
The post closes with this thought as the changes take effect:
I was the architect of these changes. This is not about the company’s loss of focus or diminution of commitment. Rather, in my view, these changes are necessary if we are to advance the state of trust in computing. When I joined Microsoft in 2002, it was about stopping the bleeding, healing the ecosystem and, dare I say it, sometimes getting ahead of the curve. But in the future, with new deployment cadences and a mobile-first, cloud-first world, it is dangerous to rely upon past paradigms that were built for a different environment. While I am proud of our past, we need to plan for the future.
Take note of the line in that last paragraph – the new deployment cadences – which is exactly what we are seeing Microsoft has changed significantly over the last two years.
I must admit I was worried when I first saw the news last week that this group was impacted however, after reading Scott’s post I feel much better about it all.
Security is too critical in this day and age of breaches, data theft and the proliferation to just toss it to the side as a secondary effort.
