Overview of 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 that will help ensure a more secure environment as you deploy systems and devices within the enterprise. Depending on the size of your organization, baselines could be in the form of checklists or spreadsheets that someone follows to ensure the predefined security controls are in place. A more advanced method includes capturing a snapshot or image that is already configured with 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 will be impractical to deploy...