Security Policies and Implementation Issues, 3rd Edition

Automating IT Security Policy Compliance

The one thing that computers are good at is repetition. They can do the same task repeatedly and always give the same result. Conversely, people aren’t so good at repetitious tasks. Ask an administrator to change the same setting on 100 different computers and it’s very possible that one or more of the computers will not be configured correctly. Additionally, automated tasks take less labor and ultimately cost less money. For example, a task that takes 15 minutes to complete and needs to be done 100 times will take 25 labor hours (15 × 100/60). If an administrator took 2 hours to write and schedule a script, it results in a savings of 23 labor hours. Depending on how much your administrators are paid, ...