Windows Server Support And Network Management Best Practices

Many things in this world tend to get simpler, some get more and more complex. Managing and maintaining an IT Network is one of these things. One would imagine that as time moves along, most of these activities would become more and more simple. Server Support and Network management may have gotten simpler at the individual application or platform level, but the overall activity of maintaining the network has become more complex. New security threats, viruses, and attacks lead to newer products and managing them eventually.

We are going to discuss a few basic server support and network management practices that an Admin must keep in mind in order to keep their IT Networks healthy. The below applies specifically to Windows based networks.

Patching: Security patches are updates to either the operating system or an application released by the software vendor regularly. These provide fixes to security holes or any defects that may exist with previous versions of the software product. It is essential to stay up to date with security patches for all your applications. There is a possibility that some patches may cause problems in certain environments, and hence it is always recommended to test patches on a test environment before they are deployed on to production systems. For larger networks, it is also recommended to have a centralized patch management platform like WSUS, to ensure that patches are only downloaded once and can be easily and centrally deployed across the network.

End Point Security or Anti-Virus: With the increase in the security threats over the last few years, anti-virus software has become a necessity on most Windows based computing environments. It is highly recommended to have anti-virus protection on all windows based server and client machines and ensure that latest virus signatures are downloaded and applied to the end points.

Gateway Security: Apart from end-point security, security is also required at the perimeter of the network. This offers double protection to your network and ensures that malicious data and objects are not able to enter the local area network. Devices including IPS, firewall and web filtering software belong to this category, and must be used.

Preventative Maintenance: Recurring preventative maintenance activities like disk defragmentation and disk cleanup should be run on all systems to boost performance.