Perhaps the most important way to increase security in your organization is to lower the security threshold, or footprint, of your servers and infrastructure. In other words, if there are any services running or ports open on your servers that aren't actually being used purposefully, you should disable or turn that particular service off. Now, hardening a Windows Server by disabling services and uninstalling things isn't an easy job; you can quickly turn something off that is important to the operating system and cause all kinds of problems on that server. Thankfully, there is a much safer and more secure way to harden your servers, but it requires planning from the beginning of your server build.
Server Core is a version of Windows Server 2016 that is essentially a headless operating system; all of your interaction with it is either command-line driven or done remotely from other servers or systems. Server Core is an alternate installation method to the full Windows desktop version of Server 2016. It installs the necessary technical componentry to behave as a Windows Server, join to your domain, and host the roles and services you need it to host, but it does all of that without a graphical desktop interface. This dramatically lowers the security vulnerability footprint and attack vectors on the server, but does mean you have to re-wire your brain in how you interact with these servers. Since Server Core is a big leap forward for security in many companies, it is appropriate that we start working with it here in our chapter regarding security. Let's take a quick look at the installation process for it, and an initial glance at the interface, so you get familiar with the console you will be looking at on these new, hardened servers you are going to start using.
