Incorporating best practices

To finish off this chapter, we wanted to provide a checklist of the most important items that will help enforce your security baselines. The following list is ranked in order of importance as you look to build and enforce your baselines:

• Select and deploy a framework to build a foundation.
• Select a baseline foundation. We covered CIS and Windows security baselines in this chapter.
• For your Windows devices, use the policy analyzer from the Microsoft SCT to review your baselines.
• Create or use a Golden Image template for each use case that you can reuse and always keep up to date with the latest updates.
• Build well-documented and easy-to-follow procedures that others can use and follow.
• Use the automation of controls and tools to re-enforce the baseline—for example, MDM with Intune or Active Directory Group Policy.
• Use compliance policies to validate whether controls are in place. This will also help with auditing devices...