Planning your deployment

Finally, you’ve done all the legwork, engaged all the stakeholders, and discovered and scoped your way to a clear understanding of your environment and its hurdles. Now to focus on what you came here for: planning your MDE deployment. Important considerations at this point are as follows:

• Logically grouping your target devices
• Determining a rollout cadence
• Selecting your deployment method
• Understanding SOC needs
• Creating a backout plan

Creating buckets

With your initial discovery done and your configuration management architecture understood, you should be ready to start to solidify the logical groups you’ve been using to understand your environment, based (at a minimum) on the operating system and management approach. Again, don’t be afraid to create more granular buckets for critical systems that require a light or more careful approach.

Once finalized, you’ll want to plan on creating these...