Mastering Active Directory

Preventing users from changing system settings

The Windows system does have a software firewall by default to prevent hosts from threats, but sometimes this prevents access to certain application traffic. Most of the time, the reaction to this will be either to disable the firewall or allow application traffic via the custom rule. But if it happens without the IT team knowing about it, it can put the entire infrastructure at risk. Group policies allow you to force these types of sensitive settings and prevent users from modifying them. Not only firewall settings, group policies can also be used to prevent modifying services, preventing access to control panel features, preventing changes to applications, and much more.