Group Policy Software Deployments



Group Policy Software Deployments

Introduction

With the increasing use of information and communication technologies in every area of life, various security issues have raised. These security issues are more serious for the companies and business organization which have to ensure data and network security. Currently, I am working as a junior network administrator located in Silicon Valley, California. Since the company relies on networking technologies for storing and transferring its intellectual property data, network security is instrumental for the authorities of company. This paper aims at designing group policies and Group Policy Objects (GPO's), for improving the efficiency of different tasks of the company. First of all, the company needs to install new software for several hundred network users; obviously this task has the potential to take lots of time and dig deeply into the IT budget. To ensure that installation task completes successfully, the paper provides a group policy action plan based on SDLC. The action plan highlights the association between each phase of SDLC and the aspect of group policy.

The existing GPO prevents approximately 50 administrators from accessing a software tool required for them to do their job. However, as the hardware requirements of this software tools have significantly increases, therefore, there is a need to upgrade it. Moreover, some of the administrators' computers need to be upgraded before this tool can be installed. The paper includes a graphical representation for depicting that how a group policy can help the administrators to access the software tool, and upgrading it to the latest available version. A disaster recovery plan is also included for Windows Server 2008 Active Directory network to prevent the loss of crucial data. In addition, network maintenance and monitoring procedures are also proposed, in order to be able detect the problem even before its occurrence; the procedures include how to restore Active Directory for both a single domain controller and an object or container within Active Directory if disaster strikes.

Installing Software Using Group Policy

The Group Policy feature of latest version of Windows has made it possible for the network administrators to install software on hundreds of computers, without even getting up from their chair (Tulloch and Sanders, 2006). This feature would help me in installing the software on the company's computers in the little possible time, with the lowest possible associated cost. However, before creating the policy, I'll have to go through a sequence of simple steps.

Steps Required for Group Installation

Obtain the installation file for the software, which is to be deployed on the computers. The procedure of Group Policy requires that the format of installation file should be in Microsoft Software Installer (MSI). Fortunately enough, the software which I need to install on all the computers is already in MSI format. This step can be mapped onto the investigation phase of SDLC, during which the requirements of the projects are studied, and processes of data input, storage and output are observed (Kay, 2012).

After obtaining the file, next step is to create a ...