Creating the Secure Managed Desktop: Using Group Policy, SoftGrid, Microsoft Deployment Toolkit, and Other Management Tools

3.1. Overview of Change and Configuration Management

Believe it or not, you're expensive. Your salary, the percentage of rent your office takes up, the software you use that helps the business run—it all costs money. Making those costs tangible is a difficult proposition. Some costs are hard to put into concrete numbers. How do you quantify the cost of sending a technician to a user's desktop when they've inadvertently set the background color, the foreground color, and the font color to black and hit the Apply button?

Accounting for these costs is a constant challenge, and bringing these costs under control is even more difficult. The Gartner Group, in the early 1990s, generated a new strategy to help with this predicament and proposed a new ...