SCEP does require paid licensing to work, so for a very small environment Microsoft Security Essentials can at least provide a basic level of security protection.Īlthough installing Microsoft Security Essentials in a server operating system is not officially supported, it does work and correctly detects threats, as we’ll see here in our example. While this is not officially supported, it does provide an increased level of security that is better than nothing, however it’s recommended that you look into using a proper product that is fit for purpose such as Microsoft’s System Center Endpoint Protection (SCEP) which is an enterprise antimalware solution. Despite this, users with a very small amount of Windows server installations have been looking for ways to install Windows Defender in order to provide at least a basic level of security. It is important to note that Microsoft Security Essentials is designed to provide a basic level of free protection for home or small business PCs rather than important server infrastructure. Microsoft Security Essentials provides most of the protection methods that Windows Defender does with the exception of rootkit and bootkit protections.

While it is not possible to directly download Windows Defender to install, we can instead make use of Microsoft Security Essentials which is available as a slightly cut down version for older versions of Windows, such as Windows 7, in order to help protect against viruses, spyware and other malicious software. To provide a basic level of security in a small server environment, we can install Microsoft Security Essentials with some simple modifications which contains most of the functionality of Windows Defender for free.īy default if you try to install Microsoft Security Essentials in Windows Server you will receive various errors which we will cover how to fix here. Windows Defender has been built into Windows 8, 8.1 and 10 by default to provide protection against malware, however there is no such default program installed in the Windows server operating system.

Open microsoft security essentials