What term describes the practice of maintaining and enforcing configuration settings for server roles across deployments?

What term describes the practice of maintaining and enforcing configuration settings for server roles across deployments?

• A. Trend analysis
• B. Configuration baselines
• C. Antivirus
• D. Web filtering

Answer: (B)

Configuration baselines are standardized, approved configurations that define how a server should be set up for a particular role. They represent the known-good state used across deployments, ensuring consistency so every server of a given role starts from the same settings. By maintaining these baselines, drift from the desired configuration can be detected and automatically remediated, supporting security, compliance, and reliable operations across environments. Tools like Puppet, Chef, Ansible, or DSC help enforce these baselines by applying the configurations and correcting deviations. The other options don’t describe this practice: trend analysis looks at data over time to identify patterns, rather than enforcing a standard configuration; antivirus focuses on malware protection, and web filtering controls access to content, neither of which governs how server configurations are maintained across deployments.

Configuration baselines are standardized, approved configurations that define how a server should be set up for a particular role. They represent the known-good state used across deployments, ensuring consistency so every server of a given role starts from the same settings. By maintaining these baselines, drift from the desired configuration can be detected and automatically remediated, supporting security, compliance, and reliable operations across environments. Tools like Puppet, Chef, Ansible, or DSC help enforce these baselines by applying the configurations and correcting deviations.

The other options don’t describe this practice: trend analysis looks at data over time to identify patterns, rather than enforcing a standard configuration; antivirus focuses on malware protection, and web filtering controls access to content, neither of which governs how server configurations are maintained across deployments.