Bit9 White Paper Sample

It is important to lock down workstations for a variety of both business and technical reasons. The strange thing is that a business's needs and the needs of the IT department are often one and the same, but for different reasons. A perfect example of this is the fact that an unauthorized piece of software has the potential to affect system stability.

When the IT department comes up with an approved configuration for desktop machines, the configuration includes a set of applications that are compatible with each other, but that also meet the company's business needs. The approved configuration will also likely include a set of drivers and system services that are proven to be stable.

If a user were to install some random piece of software onto a system that is running a carefully planned and tested configuration, that piece of software may or may not have compatibility issues with the existing configuration. For example, the new application could potentially overwrite critical driver files or registry entries. These type of activities could result in system stability problems, or in a full-fledged system crash.