Page 1157 - (ISC)² CISSP Certified Information Systems Security Professional Official Study Guide

Server) in the figure. It’s also possible to store images on external
hard drives, USB drives, or DVDs.

3. Personnel then deploy the image to systems as needed. These

systems often require additional configuration to finalize them,
such as giving them unique names. However, the overall
configuration of these systems is the same as the baseline system.

Baseline images improve the security of systems by ensuring that
desired security settings are always configured correctly. Additionally,
they reduce the amount of time required to deploy and maintain
systems, thus reducing the overall maintenance costs. Deployment of a

prebuilt image can require only a few minutes of a technician’s time.
Additionally, when a user’s system becomes corrupt, technicians can
redeploy an image in minutes, instead of taking hours to troubleshoot
the system or trying to rebuild it from scratch.

It’s common to combine imaging with other automated methods for
baselines. In other words, administrators can create one image for all

desktop computers within an organization. They then use automated
methods to add additional applications, features, or settings for
specific groups of computers. For example, computers in one
department may have additional security settings or applications
applied through scripting or other automated tools.

Organizations typically protect the baseline images to ensure that they
aren’t modified. In a worst-case scenario, malware can be injected into

an image and then deployed to systems within the network.