As of December 31, 2015, Microsoft announced cessation of support for the URL Reputation Services (URS) that TMG uses for web site categorization. Usefulness and performance of some of the advanced features will begin to decline in 2016.
TMG cannot be supported on Microsoft Server 2012 and even if you can install it, it doesn’t take advantage of some of the newer security features built into that OS.
Several other concerns are the lack of support for OS’s beyond Microsoft Server 2008 R2 no more native support for newer versions of Microsoft applications like Exchange and SharePoint and the built-in deployment wizards only provide support for publishing Exchange and SharePoint 2010 (which, require significantly more manual configuration and raising additional supportability issues). So, owners should have a plan to migrate to another technology, regardless of whether it is still working and/or support is available. With all of the vulnerabilities being found, publicized and exploited, it is merely a matter of time before we see the remaining production devices compromised.
There are also few to no efforts being applied to proactively develop patches. The final iteration of the solution was discontinued in 2012 and hits the end of mainstream support in 2015 with extended support going through 2020.Īs with any product that has been “end of life-d,” there are no more vendor resources being applied to producing features. I have never supported it so I can’t speak to how well it performed but it lasted for 15 years in its varied incarnations so adoption/market acceptance must have been reasonable. And it did this when there weren’t a lot of vendors delivering composite solutions. From a value standpoint, it was an attempt to provide more, with less of a datacenter footprint, by integrating common/commodity security services. Microsoft TMG is a multifunction security gateway that acts as an Internet traffic proxy gateway providing additional network antivirus scanning, firewall, VPN termination, and web caching services. My first glib thought was “quickly” but I bit my tongue and went on with a better formed recommendation along the same lines. The question was what would be my recommendations for replacing it. I was recently briefing with a customer when a question was raised about Microsoft Forefront Threat Management Gateway (TMG) and its end of life. David Monahan is Research Director for Enterprise Management Associates (EMA) and is a featured guest blogger.