Introduction to baselining

Security baselining is the practice of implementing a minimum set of standards and configuration within your environment; more specifically, capturing a minimum configuration for your Windows devices. Building a baseline provides a minimum defined standard, which will help ensure a more secure environment as you deploy systems and devices within your enterprise. Depending on the size of your organization, baselines could vary from checklists or spreadsheets that someone follows to ensure the predefined security controls are in place to a captured snapshot or image that is already preconfigured with the predefined security controls. In addition to the starting baseline, there are additional management tools to layer and enforce baseline configurations. A couple of examples include Group Policy Objects (GPOs) and Mobile Device Management (MDM).

Unless you are a small business with under 100 employees, it would be impractical to deploy any type of system...