Operating System Build Management in the Enterprise

Mitigating the risk to critical systems from vulnerabilities in operating system builds is an important responsibility of any system administrator. In organisations with a large number of servers, running multiple applications and services, managing the state of production builds can be a time consuming exercise. Regardless of the size of an organisation's IT infrastructure, it is crucial from a security perspective that administrators know the detail of the production operating system configuration on the servers for which they are responsible. Establishing a standard system build policy for each operating system is the foundation upon which to build an understanding of systems, improving the ability to detect change and to understand the risk posed by new threats. This paper discusses points to consider in creating system build policies and how to tackle both bringing systems into compliance and ensuring that they remain compliant.