Preface

Compliance is a requirement for any company regardless of its size and configuration. Being compliant will generate benefits for your company. Take your customer purchase, sales, and invoice data as an example. Regardless of where this data resides—in an Excel sheet or Customer Relationship Management system—if the server system this data is on is stolen because it was not protected, even by a simple lock, then your company has ended up having multiple problems, and you become non-compliant. In that case:

• Your company might not be able to fulfill your customer orders or send quotes, leading to loss of revenue.
• If you are not able to regain this information, you will have a reputational issue, as customers will find out about it and not trust you any longer. In the worst-case scenario, they may cancel further work with your business.
• Your business is non-compliant because you breached data protection laws which state that sensitive data should be protected.

Being compliant will not only help you to save money in the long term and potentially keep your managers out of jail, it could also lead to competitive advantages.

In recent years, more and more companies have demanded certain certifications or adherence to standards from participants in a tender. So, being compliant with certain standards will provide you with a competitive advantage.

This book will start you on your journey to creating a compliance program and realizing the benefits of implementing this program using Microsoft Security Compliance Manager and the Microsoft System Centre family.

We will start with the basic recipes that you should have as the absolute minimum and, with each chapter, add greater complexity.

Note

Although throughout this book, we refer to System Center 2012, all examples have been tested on System Center 2012 R2.