Mastering Active Directory - Second Edition

Preventing users from changing system settings

By default, the Windows system has a software firewall to protect machines 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 to allow application traffic via the custom rule. But if someone change the firewall settings without the IT team's knowledge, it can possibly put the entire infrastructure at risk. Group policies allow you to force these types of sensitive settings and prevent users from modifying them. As well as firewall settings, group policies can also be used to prevent the modification of services, prevent access to control panel features, prevent changes to applications, ...