I have been at the MVP Summit in Redmond, and have been carefully noting “advances” between Windows Server 8 Developer Preview (made available at the BUILD conference in Anaheim) and the newer Windows Server 8 Beta build made available on Feb 29 2012.
One new feature is that the SMB 2.2 protocol used for client/server file data exchange now allows for data encryption. Both the client and the server need to be running the new SMB 2.2 protocol – so this means both need to be Windows 8, or the Server needs to be a fairly new one from a vendor that has implemented SMB 2.2
Verticals such as the health care industry should find this particularly useful. The huge overhead of using a solution such as IPSEC can now be avoided.
Details such as what encryption algorithm, as well as performance characteristics of this encryption will be blogged about, once I perform some experiments with the beta bits.
The only public Microsoft information as of today is at http://technet.microsoft.com/en-us/library/hh831795.aspx
winntfs 