Ensure compliance of Security Baseline with Security Compliance Management

In today’s IT environment, compliance with governance regulations and industry standards, such as the Sarbanes Oxley Act, can be a source of deep concern.  In addition, organisations need to also manage risks resulting from emerging threats and changing conditions within their IT infrastructure.  As a result, organisations need an approach to understand the state of the security settings within their IT infrastructure, assess the compliance of a security baseline, and demonstrate that the compliance requirements have been met.

You need a way to manage the compliance process related to assessing and remediating security baselines.  The complexity of managing this process can be significantly reduced through prescriptive guidance and automated tools.

Join the Beta Program forSecurity Compliance Management.

The Security Compliance Management toolkit provides best practices from Microsoft about how to plan, set, get and remediate a security baseline, along with tools that you can use to verify the implementation of recommended security baselines from Microsoft for Windows Vista, Windows XP SP2, and Windows Server 2003 SP2.  The toolkit helps customers quickly and easily provide this compliance information to auditors to demonstrate how their organisation is meeting important compliance regulations.

The toolkit helps you manage the compliance process by enabling:

· Automated security checks in their environment.

· Verification of security baseline in their environment, and identification of baseline settings changes or “drift” from prescribed values.

· Implement regulatory compliance through security checks.

The verification process is performed by Configuration Packs that can be applied using the desired configuration management (DCM) feature of Microsoft® System Center Configuration Manager 2007.

The important benefits this toolkit provides :

Manage Compliance. Provides a comprehensive view and reports of the security baseline in your environment for Windows Vista, Windows XP SP2, and Windows Server 2003 SP2

Reduce Complexity .   Provides prescriptive guidance and automated tools to scan security baselines and assess compliance for client and server operating systems across your organization.

Manage Risk .   Manage changes to security settings within your Windows® infrastructure that can compromise the integrity of your IT systems.

Accelerate Assessment and Planning.   Take advantage of prescriptive security baselines to quickly and easily implement a proactive approach to verify security settings.

Confidently Manage.   All security recommendations reflect the combined knowledge of experts, partners and customers, and they are fully tested and supported by Microsoft.

Free.   The toolkit is free on the Microsoft Download Center.

Security Compliance Managementis now in Beta.   

What types of customers should be interested in this beta program? The toolkit is primarily intended to help midsise and enterprise organisations with domain-based environments that use Group Policy to apply their security baselines.  The toolkit also is intended for customers running Configuration Manager 2007.

To learn more about the toolkit, download it from the Microsoft Download Center, click here.