The concept of a PC Change and Configuration Management Policy is to determine what settings, attributes and metrics contribute to the PC working state and identify where any particular PC deviates from your defined ‘good’ configuration state.
It is vitally important to keep in check all relevant PC configuration settings, performance metrics and application response times that together govern the quality and consistency of delivered IT service levels to the business.
However, while it is obvious that governing the performance and health of your PCs is important, the need to ensure your PCs are compliant with security and external corporate governance legislations is now equally necessary.
Corporate Governance policies such as Sarbanes Oxley (SOX), GLBA, NERC, PCI DSS, HIPAA, MiFID, SAS 70, and Basel II have all been introduced to ensure minimum levels of security and integrity are maintained for company financial information and any stored personal details of customers.
Your Servicedesk or Helpdesk system has a role to play, typically playing an integral role in any ITIL Change and Configuration Management Process, providing reconciliation data for any planned changes to any configuration item, including PCs.
The Top Ten of PC Configuration Management
1. PC Performance Management - Measure and control all parameters affecting IT Service Delivery, including configuration settings, PC health and user experience
2. PC Compliance Audits - Take steps to automate the audit of your PC estate in order to provide auditors with accurate details of all security and access controls for compliance with all Corporate Governance legislations, such as PCI DSS, SOX, GLBA, NERC, HIPAA, MiFID, SAS 70, Basel II
3. Virtualization - when virtualising PCs in order to facilitate datacentre moves, service continuity provision and to reduce running costs, remember that you are also introducing another layer of configuration management at the Citrix Server or VM Host level that must equally be audited to ensure it is compliant with corporate governance policies
4. Compare 'one PC to many' and pinpoint all differences between a 'policy compliant' (i.e. 'working') PC and those that aren't -all key changes and deviations will be instantly identified and reported
5. Software Inventory Management - A Configuration Management solution should cover PC inventory management, PC asset management, PC performance management and PC configuration management
6. PC Security Management - Best practise is to limit the User Accounts to the minimum and restrict access to Administrator accounts with Admin privileges but you also need to regularly check that PC User Accounts have not been modified, added or changed
7. PC File system Management - a key aspect of PCI DSS and other corporate governance policies is that core filesystem attributes have their integrity maintained, for instance, the Win32 folder should not be changed or modified and it is vital to regularly check this
8. Registry Settings - as the core repository of PC Configuration Settings, any Registry changes must be logged and analysed
9. Running Processes and Services/Service States - build a whitelist and blacklist of authorised/unauthorized process and services, together with any mandatory ‘must run’ or illegal ‘never run’ processes and services
10. PC User support process - the troubleshooting process for a remote or local PC user covers all aspects of the nature of the problem, what they were using the PC for prior to the problem occurring and any recent changes that may have been made to cause the problem. A configuration change tracking management system will identify all changes made to the PC in terms of performance, application response times, installed programs and other configuration changes that may contribute to a problem.
All the above change and configuration management tasks can be automated using change and configuration management software solutions, the best of which will cover desktop PCs together with change and configuration management of your servers and all network devices such as firewalls, switches and routers.
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