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My name is Todd Kutzke. I lead Microsoft’s Application Consulting & Engineering (ACE) Team. The ACE Team is responsible for application performance, security & privacy engineering @ Microsoft. Our mission is to drive application excellence into production by providing application engineering leadership through world class performance, security & privacy analysis services. The ACE Team was born in Microsoft’s IT division in 1998. Back then, ACE was focused on improving performance for Microsoft’s ever growing internet presence. We supported Microsoft’s business by ensuring that Microsoft’s internet applications could handle the ever increasing traffic being run on them. These were the days when dial-up bandwidth was the norm for home internet connections. E-Commerce developed during this time & it was the ACE Team that contributed to ensuring that Microsoft’s e-commerce sites could scale up to support Microsoft’s global business. In 2003, we published a book, which documented the performance testing knowledge we’d learned during the previous five years. Our book was a team effort & a first for being published for many of the contributing authors. For me personally, it was a fulfilling professional accomplishment made even better through team participation.

Change is the norm @ Microsoft though, & in 2001 I was “asked” to develop a security team capable of ensuring the security of Microsoft’s IT applications, the apps that Microsoft runs it’s extremely successful business on. As a result, the ACE Performance team gave birth to the ACE Security Team. Formative in 2001, ACE Security has developed into a world class team of app security professionals that I’m proud to be a part of. It may seem unusual to build a security team from performance professionals; however, we derive valuable synergies from closely coupling these engineering teams. It helps us answer questions like how security remediation affects application performance & vice versa. After all a secure application may keep the evil doers out, but Microsoft must also support a scalable business on it applications. Both performance & security are equally important. Ever evolving, the ACE Security team has now given birth to the ACE Services team. ACE Services is focused on bringing what we’ve learned securing one of the most dynamic & frequently attacked IT app landscapes in the world to Microsoft’s customers.

True to the change paradigm, in 2002, ACE Privacy was born. This team also supports Microsoft’s trustworthy computing strategy by ensuring that the IT landscape @ Microsoft is a platform where people have access to their personal information and the opportunity to control how it is used. Microsoft regards the protection of personally identifiable information as a vital element of trust, and it regards trust as vital to the success of its business. The ACE Privacy team ensures that MS IT applications meet or exceed Microsoft’s privacy standards.

Together the ACE Team drives application excellence.

Todd Kutzke

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