infoTECH Feature

July 30, 2015

Microsoft's Support of Secure Shell: What it Means and What Lies Ahead

By TMCnet Special Guest
Sami Pippuri, Director of Product Marketing, SSH Communications Security

With 128,000 employees and annual revenues of $86.8 billion, Microsoft (News - Alert) is a mega-corporation. It is the third most valuable company in the world by market cap and its software powers the majority of home computers, industrial and financial systems. So, when Microsoft announces a change in direction, it’s worth taking notice.

In early June 2015, Microsoft made what could be considered a surprising announcement to many: it will be supporting Secure Shell (SSH) in its PowerShell tool used by system administrators, developers and power users around the globe. The move will make not only the Secure Shell client native on Windows but will also make the Secure Shell server native as well. Microsoft will also contribute code to the OpenSSH project – huge news to anyone who has followed the history of Microsoft and open source.

This change in direction also highlights the change that Microsoft is going through under the leadership of Satya Nadella (News - Alert), who took the helm a little more than a year ago as only the third CEO of the company. And interestingly, with this news, things came full circle for me personally – my current role at SSH heading Global Product Marketing harkens back to my past at Microsoft, heading its Developer Product Marketing team. 

The blog post with the announcement gives a glimpse of the shift in the corporate culture at Microsoft that was required for making the project possible, after two earlier failed attempts at pushing this through. Now, under Satya Nadella’s leadership, the company has realized that, despite its size, it cannot control everything in computing. It appears that the company is moving away from reinventing tools that already work for people and instead is focusing on adding value and helping make its customers more secure and productive. It is precisely for those reasons Microsoft's customers had been requesting the support of Secure Shell: to support the SSH protocol so they can be more productive out of the box. Ever since Secure Shell was invented by Tatu Ylönen, 20 years ago, it’s been the tool of choice for system administrators to secure remote access to servers. Today, it has become truly universal and ubiquitous.

Clearly, it has been an uphill battle on the part of the PowerShell team to include this open source tool into a core Microsoft product, something I also bumped into while working there. But this is a new Microsoft, one that is shipping open source development tools; supporting OSX, iOS and Android (News - Alert); and supporting Linux virtual machines in its own Azure cloud, so I’m sure the team got the full support from their new CEO to make this happen.

Many questions remain, including the general availability of the tools, backward compatibility to older Windows builds and so on. This is definitely the early phase of the development cycle. The team received an internal approval to ship the tools, so the blog post also served an internal purpose as a “heads-up” to the rest of the company. We’ll hear more once the team is ready to release the tools. Fortunately, PowerShell as a release vehicle isn’t tied to the operating system releases, so chances are that it will also support older Windows systems and, as a result, its release timing can be more flexible.

This announcement is a boon for the overall Secure Shell ecosystem, as it will raise awareness in the Windows system administrator space, increase the size of the addressable market and provide an official Microsoft-supported solution with native updates for organizations. It is also likely that there will be more keys to manage securely and lessons to apply for managing privileged user access transparently – topics that SSH Communications (News - Alert) Security is a leader on. It’s exciting to think about what these new capabilities will provide for Windows customers in the very near future!

About the Author: Sami Pippuri is Director of Product Marketing, SSH Communications Security.




Edited by Dominick Sorrentino
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