Leveraging Group Policy

Group Policy is a powerful tool that all Active Directory administrators should be familiar with. While it can be difficult to know which policies to set out of the thousands of available options, Microsoft has done a great deal of work for you with the Microsoft Security Compliance Manager (SCM). You can acquire this tool from http://www.microsoft.com/scm. The requirements and instructions for installation, as well as the download file, are given in the links provided on that page. Among the requirements is an installation of SQL Server. An Express installation is included in the package if you haven't got one available.

At the time of this writing, the current version of SCM is 3.0. Its package includes policies for Server and Hyper-V versions only through 2012. However, these policies will work just as well for the 2012 R2 versions. You can click on the File menu and then on Check for Updates to scan the Microsoft repository for any new baselines that may be available...