The Security Compliance Management toolkit

This toolkit provides best practices from Microsoft about how to plan, deploy, and monitor a security baseline. In addition, the toolkit provides remediation recommendations to address security baseline issues. The toolkit also offers a proven method that your organisation can use to effectively monitor the compliance state of recommended security baselines for Windows Vista®, Windows® XP Service Pack 2 (SP2), and Windows Server® 2003 SP2.

The Security Compliance Management toolkit is now available. To learn more about the toolkit, browse to www.microsoft.com/securitycompliance.

The toolkit is designed to help you accomplish the following steps for this process:

- Plan how to effectively meet your regulatory compliance requirements
- Deploy a security baseline using the GPOAccelerator tool
- Monitor your environment's security baseline, and identify baseline settings that change or "drift" from prescribed values.
- Maintain the regulatory compliance state of your environment.

The Security Compliance Management toolkit provides the following resources to help  your organisation meet its compliance requirements:

- Best practices for managing the compliance of security baselines in your Windows environment with specific information about how to plan, deploy, monitor, and remediate your security baseline
- References to prescriptive, tested, end-to-end security guidance from Microsoft for Windows Vista, Windows XP SP2, and Windows Server 2003 SP2.
- The 12 Configuration Packs for you to use with the DCM feature in Configuration Manager 2007 to monitor the compliance state of the security baseline in your environment.

To learn more, download the toolkit from the Microsoft Download Center.