Chapter 1, Planning and Getting Started with System Center Endpoint Protection, walks you through an easy approach to what you need to consider when planning and designing an System Center Configuration Manner hierarchy with the Endpoint Protection in mind. You will gain knowledge of real-life best practices when setting up SCCM.

Chapter 2, Configuring Endpoint Protection in Configuration Manager, walks through all the necessary steps to configure SCCM with Endpoint Protection environment, how to configure Definition Updates, and shows how to run it successfully along with SCCM and WSUS.

Chapter 3, Operations and Maintenance for Endpoint Protection in Configuration Manager, describes the workflow of creation and deploying antimalware policies using SCCM. The chapter also shows how to configure Windows Firewall and monitor the Endpoint Protection clients.

Chapter 4, Updates, dives into advanced and crucial Endpoint Protection update functionalities. This chapter also covers the different supported ways of handling updates, as well as taking in to consideration working with low bandwidth-connected branch offices.

Chapter 5, Security and Privacy for Endpoint Protection in Configuration Manager, focuses on security and privacy concerning SCCM and Endpoint Protection, with some best practices. It gives also the opportunity gain knowledge of Microsoft Security Center with Automatic Sample submission.

Chapter 6, Configuring and Troubleshooting Performance and Advanced Protection, discusses what to consider when thinking of safety and making applications work properly with the antimalware solution and recipes on how to handle OS deployment and BitLocker.

Chapter 7, Troubleshooting and Fixing Issues, provides best practices to troubleshoot SCCM with a focus on Endpoint Protection when it generates errors during its setup and utilization. It starts by tackling major issues presented in SCCM that reflect many other components and explains how to escalate problem resolution using debugging tools and hands-on tips.

Chapter 8, Malware Handling, the best chapter, comes last in this book and provides real-life experience of handling malware with a focus on Endpoint Protection. But in this chapter, you will also gain valuable knowledge about how you can improve your security even more and protect against ransomware.

This book assumes a medium-level of System Center Configuration Manager knowledge, basic knowledge of Windows Workstation, and moderate experience with Windows Server. The book will go through simply toward a more advanced SCCM environment, which may require a basic understanding of networking and virtualization concepts. As this is a cookbook, there will be several recipes that you can try out and benefit from using in your production environment after testing that they work in your business.

With the Microsoft-wide evaluation licence, you will be able to try this product for 180 days.

SCCM can be installed and run either on a bare metal or virtual machine. However, this book requires that you have enough resources to the whole setup. Minimum hardware or virtual requirements are as follows:

In this book, you will need the following software list:

Internet connectivity is required to install the necessary to get all the setup updates during installation. Although it can be predownloaded, you will need Internet connectivity to get the WSUS and Software Update Point working.

To make use of the content of this book, basic prior knowledge of SCCM as well as handling Windows is expected. If you do not have this knowledge, it is always possible to catch up the basic requirements by having a quick read of the major components of the Microsoft Technet. Refer to the following link: https://docs.microsoft.com/nb-no/sccm/core/servers/deploy/start-using.

There are several books about SCCM and online guides that can improve your knowledge of the product. As SCCM is a huge product, I recommend you start with the basics first so that you have a good foundation and understanding of how it all works.

But this book will also explain very well all the terminology and recipes so that you can actually understand them with very little experience in advance.

This book is well-suited for antivirus and antimalware administrators, as well as security administrators, to gain more understanding and knowledge of how this works. But the book is also highly valuable for SCCM admins to understand the needs for security admins.

And even if you are not at all interested in System Center Endpoint Protection or Windows Defender, as an admin, you feel a security responsibility to keep up with today's threats and how you can protect your business computers even more. There is information and recipes regarding how to protect against ransomware.

In this book, you will find several headings that appear frequently (Getting ready, How to do it, How it works, There's more, and See also).

To give clear instructions on how to complete a recipe, we use these sections as follows:

In this book, you will find a number of text styles that distinguish between different kinds of information. Here are some examples of these styles and an explanation of their meaning.

Code words in text, database table names, folder names, filenames, file extensions, pathnames, dummy URLs, user input, and Twitter handles are shown as follows: "You need to make a package of the scepinstall.exe with the policy file."

Any command-line input or output is written as follows:

New-FsrmFileScreen -Path "$i" -Active: $true -IncludeGroup "CryptoWall" -Notification $Notification
}
-------------

New terms and important words are shown in bold. Words that you see on the screen, for example, in menus or dialog boxes, appear in the text like this: "I recommend putting its database to the full SQL Server and not Internal Database"

Feedback from our readers is always welcome. Let us know what you think about this book—what you liked or disliked. Reader feedback is important for us as it helps us develop titles that you will really get the most out of.

To send us general feedback, simply e-mail <[email protected]>, and mention the book's title in the subject of your message.

If there is a topic that you have expertise in and you are interested in either writing or contributing to a book, see our author guide at www.packtpub.com/authors.

Now that you are the proud owner of a Packt book, we have a number of things to help you to get the most from your purchase.