GPO Best Practices
Group Policy makes dealing with your operating system easier and more effective. In addition, this allows you further control over network accounts. This makes your network safer from outsiders. Moreover, it reduces the trusted insider threat.
Group Policy enables you to prevent users from accessing certain files or settings in the system, run specific scripts when the system starts up or shuts down, or force a particular home page to open for every user in the network. Here are Active Directory Group Policy best practices that will help you to secure your systems and optimize Group Policy performance.
Restrict Software Installation
You don’t need your employees downloading apps that could compromise your system. Restrict downloads and ensure every app or extension goes through an approval process.
Apply GPOs to OUs at the root level
A GPO’s recursive structure works in your favor when it comes to working with OUs. In this scenario, you want sub-OUs to inherit the policies from the parent OU, and you don’t want to link each policy to an OU individually. Feel free to apply GPOs in broad strokes here. If you have computers or users you don’t want to inherit a setting, you can isolate them in their own OU and apply a specific policy directly to it.
Do Not Modify the Default Domain Controller Policy
This GPO should only contain User Rights Assignment Policy and Audit Policy. Any other settings to the Domain Controllers should be set in a separate GPO.
Control Access to Command Prompt
Command Prompts can be used to run commands that give high-level access to users and evade other restrictions on the system. So, to ensure system resources’ security, it’s wise to disable Command Prompt.
After you have disabled Command Prompt and someone tries to open a command window, the system will display a message stating that some settings are preventing this action.
Don’t disable GPOs
Permanently disabling a GPO will remove the setting from your entire environment, which could be a problem if that particular GPO is doing just fine in another OU. Instead, delete the particular troublesome GPO link from the OU instead of disabling the GPO altogether.
Disable Guest Account
The guest account is a security nightmare. Often this account allows access to your computer with no password required. Windows should disable guest accounts by default.
Using group policy best practice allows you to sure up your network security. However, even the right settings can still leave gaps in your security system.