Microsoft® Windows® Group Policy Guide

Summary

Hardening clients and servers requires an understanding of the available methods for establishing the security settings in an efficient and consistent manner. Two tools are designed to harden clients and servers: security templates and security policies. Security templates can configure the majority of the security settings to harden any client or server. Security policies are created with the Security Configuration Wizard, which is more intuitive to use and is based on server roles, administrative functions, and other aspects of the servers.

Whether you use a security template, a security policy, or both, you should use Group Policy whenever possible to deploy these settings. As we saw earlier in this book, a key aspect of security hardening ...