Configuration management for windows

Configuration management CM is a systems engineering process for establishing and maintaining consistency of a product's performance, functional, and physical attributes with its requirements, design, and operational information throughout its life. Configuration management is a form of IT service management ITSM as defined by ITIL that ensures the configuration of system resources, computer systems, servers and other assets are known, good and trusted.

It's sometimes referred to as IT automation. Most configuration management involves a high degree of automation to achieve these goals. This is why teams use different tools like Puppet, Ansible, Terraform and other configuration management tools. By using automation, it's easier to build in checks and redundancies, improving the potential for omissions due to human error and the accuracy for keeping assets in the desired state.

Without automation, a single engineer forgetting to update a piece of software can leave a system with an outdated version of the software that has a known vulnerability listed on CVE.

This vulnerability could be exploited to spread computer worms , install ransomware or another type of malware. Automation is valuable for another reason, it greatly improves the efficiency and makes configuration management of large systems manageable.

Chances are, technology powers your business. If you sell SaaS Software-as-a-Service, technology is the product. The configuration of these systems is critical to your organization's success. Configuration is what makes your systems servers, networks, operating systems, data centers, configuration files, IT assets and all other configuration items work.

You need to manage it carefully and keep track of configuration changes to ensure traceability, or your business and end users could suffer from systems outages, data breaches and data leaks. To reduce cybersecurity risk and improve operations, many businesses employ a configuration management database CMDB , configuration management plan and a configuration manager to ensure successful configuration management. Having accurate records of the state of your systems is essential and baselining an attribute can ensure formal configuration change control processes are effective.

Which is why version control is critical for al IT infrastructure. This helps with project management, asset management and audit processes, as well as software development and debugging.

DevOps teams are taking the United States and the world by storm and software configuration management is getting applied across the lifecycle of enterprise IT. As you can see from the diagram below, it's critical to think through how you plan, build, run and govern processes and handoffs, whether you're doing DevOps or not. There's a famous commercial about an auto mechanic talking about a costly engine repair that could have been avoided if the owner had replace his oil filter.

The mechanic says:. You can avoid the costs associated with configuration management by not employing it at all, however you will likely pay in:. Configuration management is included as a key systems engineering practice because it works! It keeps you from incurring costs preventatively and helps IT stop fire fighting. Moreover, good systems engineers have learned, through practical experience, that it pays for itself many times over. Use configuration management to focus on fire prevention , not fire fighting.

The financial markets felt the impact even beyond the NYSE trading floor. A new software installation caused the problem. The NYSE had installed the software on 8 of its 20 trading terminals, and the system was tested the night before go-live. However, on the morning of June 8th, a total of 8 installations failed to operate correctly. The NYSE tried to switch back to its old software, but was unable to do so before the opening of the trading session. Other than some red faces at the NYSE, the damage was minimized.

Had the outage continued for longer than 90 minutes, the repercussions would have been much more severe. Firstly, you will need a configuration management system. The configuration management systems marketplace changes frequently, and there are many different solutions out there, ranging from open source projects to commercial off the shelf technology sold by the likes of Microsoft and IBM.

Open source systems have come a long way , so despite paying for a vendor's logo and sales team, it is not always value for money to go with a big vendor. The second cost of configuration management is people, including staff often contractors, if your internal capability is immature with the skills to set up configuration management processes and tools. You will also need to factor in training of your existing staff to integrate ongoing configuration management processes into your business.

Some of the financial benefits contributing to positive ROI results found in leveraging configuration management include:. There are plenty of ROI calculations that you can apply for your business. The metric is cost avoidance in areas such as:. The benefits of configuration management flow into all these activities. These activities take time, and time is money. There are many popular configuration management tools, which makes it hard to find a tool or stack of tools that meet the system configuration needs of your organization.

The essential features and tradeoffs you need to consider include performance, always key for scaling a data center, compatibility with existing systems, ease of use, enterprise support and cybersecurity.

When it comes to market share, tools like Ansible , Puppet and Microsoft System Center Configuration Manager have sizable communities but there are only great alternatives in the CM space.

OpsWorks automates patching, updating, and configuration of servers using Chef and Puppet. These tools have many commonalities and overlapping features that provide advantages over managing configuration management by hand, including infrastructure-as-code approaches that make it easy to rollout updates and change infrastructure.

In addition, these configuration management tools help you keep a record of your assets and understand the exact state across all your servers and other networked assets. CFEngine is a configuration management framework. It allows you to manage your mission-critical tasks securely. This system configuration management tool is available as both open source and commercial software.

Server Configuration Monitor is a tool to detect and compare configuration changes to the server, applications, and databases. It allows you to configure applications and servers in real time. Auvik is easy-to-use software configuration management software that helps you to identify the root cause with up-to-date device logs. Puppet is an open source and Best configuration management tool for centralizing and automating the configuration management process. It is used to configure, manage, deploy various applications and services.

The chef is an automation platform that offers a method to configure and manage infrastructure. In this tool, Infrastructure as code implies by executing coding instead of performing manual execution. The chef tool works on Ruby and DSL for writing the configurations. Ansible tool offers simple IT automation solution. It helps you avoid t performing repetitive tasks and frees up developer teams for more strategic work. SaltStack is another effective configuration tool.

It works on a master-client setup model or a non-centralized model. This tool is based on the Python programming language. SaltStack offers push and SSH methods to communicate with clients. Juju is an open source tool which mainly emphasizes on decreasing the operational overhead of new generation software.

Juju offers features like configuring, scaling, quick deployment, integration, etc. Rudder is an open source Continuous Configuration solution. The tool is used to satisfy the need of production infrastructure. This multi-platform tool allows you to automate and maintain your production infrastructure.

TeamCity is an open source continuous integration server developed by Jet Brain. An SSH connection is required in push mode the default but pull mode is available as needed. Playbooks can be written with minimal commands or scaled with more elaborate automation tasks including roles, variables and modules.

The chief purveyor of the "infrastructure-as-code" ideal, SaltStack has gained a sizable following despite making a relatively late appearance on the market due to its many integrations with cloud providers like Google Cloud, Amazon Web Services AWS , etc. Since launching back in , Docker is a relative newbie that has taken the DevOps and software development world by storm.

The key to Docker's success is its lightweight containerization technology:. Containers can be created, configured, and saved as templates for use on other hosts running the Docker engine. These templates can then be used to create more containers with the same OS, configuration, and binaries. DSC provides a set of Windows PowerShell language extensions, new Windows PowerShell cmdlets, and resources that you can use to declaratively specify how you want your software environment to be configured.

It also provides a means to maintain and manage existing configurations. TeamCity is also one of the management and continuous integration server developed by Jet Brains and based on Java Programming Language. Learn more about TeamCity vs. Jenkins for continuous integration. Juju is an open source tool which mainly emphasizes on decreasing the operational overhead of new generation software.

Juju offers features like configuring, scaling, quick deployment, integration, etc. Rudder's unique asset-management function is capable of identifying nodes as well as their characteristics, and this can prove useful when performing configuration management actions. This CMT makes use of asset management to identify nodes for configuration management. Rudder depends on a light local agent which are installed on each and every managed system. Regardless of what tool you use for configuration management, the way to start your automation project is to discover what you have.

Automating poor processes or poorly understood infrastructure is a fast and expensive way to multiple your problems. To truly get the most out of any automation tooling, you first need to understand where the landmines already exist. Get the complete guide on how to prioritize and remediate cyber risks.

UpGuard BreachSight Monitor your business for data breaches and protect your customers' trust. UpGuard Vendor Risk Control third-party vendor risk and improve your cyber security posture. UpGuard CyberResearch new. Always improving. Risk remediation requests now include both web and questionnaire risks.

What's new in UpGuard December Release notes. Financial Services How UpGuard helps financial services companies secure customer data. Technology How UpGuard helps tech companies scale securely. Healthcare How UpGuard helps healthcare industry with security best practices.

Featured reads. Prevent Data Breaches Protect your sensitive data from breaches. Attack Surface Management What is attack surface management? Vendor Risk Management What is vendor risk management? Blog Learn about the latest issues in cybersecurity and how they affect you. Breaches Stay up to date with security research and global news about data breaches.

Latest blog posts. Proxy Servers vs. VPNs: What's the Difference? What is Compliance Management in Cybersecurity? Free score. UpGuard BreachSight Attack surface management. UpGuard Vendor Risk Third-party risk management.

UpGuard CyberResearch Managed security services.