Maintaining Workstation Standards at Scale: How Faronics Deploy Ensures Configuration Drift Never Slows You Down

Organizations succeed when they uphold their standards. This is true of business and moral standards, and it’s also true of the standards they set for their workstations. But these can slip for any number of reasons — and the consequences can be severe.

What Is Configuration Drift?

Configuration drift is the gradual divergence of IT system settings, such as servers, networks and apps, from their intended, baseline state. Frequent causes are manual tweaks, patches and updates that occur over time, creating security gaps, performance issues and compliance headaches by making systems inconsistent and unpredictable. It’s a common challenge in complex environments, where undocumented changes cause systems to behave differently, complicating troubleshooting and management. 

The Causes of Configuration Drift 

Configuration isn’t inevitable — yet it occurs so often as to seem inevitable. This is because there are so many causal factors, many of which happen naturally in offices and other work settings. Management, staff and other users can contribute to configuration drift by:

• Logging into servers directly to make quick fixes, patches or unauthorized software installations.
• Failing to record or track changes in a configuration management database (CMDB).
• Applying a temporary workaround or “hotfix” under pressure to restore service without following the standard change control process.
• Forgetting to revert a temporary change after resolving a crisis.
• Using different deployment tools, scripts or teams to provision similar environments, leading to subtle variations in settings.
• Relying on outdated or non-version-controlled scripts that introduce inconsistencies over time.
• Failing to rebuild infrastructure from scratch (re-provisioning) after a change, instead depending on in-place updates.
• Making unintentional mistakes during configuration updates.

The Consequences of Configuration Drift

OK, drift happens — so what? Sure, it can be annoying when IT systems are bogged down a bit and maybe not as responsive or quick as they once were, but how bad could it be? Well, configuration drift often leads to IT downtime, which means it leads to financial loss. For large enterprises, the cost of IT downtime can be as much as $9,000 a minute. 

Let’s look at some of the specific consequences:

• Disabled firewall rules, missing security patches and exposed default credentials create critical entry points for cyber attackers.
• Failure to meet compliance standards due to undocumented or unauthorized changes to secure settings.
• Inconsistent environments make troubleshooting nearly impossible, as the expected state doesn’t match the actual state.
• Hard-to-find bugs or conflicts between applications lead to performance degradation or catastrophic failures.

• More staff time spent manually investigating and fixing environment-specific issues caused by drift.
• Wasted compute resources because of inefficient or incorrect configurations.

Deploy vs. Configuration Drift

Faronics designed Deploy precisely to impose order and consistency on managed endpoints — a direct counter to drift. Here’s how Deploy helps IT environments:

Prevention: Setting and Enforcing the Baseline

Faronics Deploy prevents configuration drift by establishing and consistently enforcing a single, approved state across all managed endpoints. It enables effective centralized application management, allowing IT to install, uninstall and update applications from a single cloud console. This stops individual users or administrators from installing unauthorized software or leaving old, vulnerable versions on certain machines.

Features such as app presets allow for the mass deployment of a collection of approved applications with a single click. This ensures every machine in a specific group receives the same software configuration. Furthermore, IT can auto-approve updates at the category or individual patch level and apply them on-demand or schedule them for a defined window. This prevents drift caused by inconsistent patching, meaning every machine has the same secure patch level at a specified time. You can also test patches on a control group before mass deployment, preventing a rogue update from destabilizing the entire fleet.

Last, the OS Deployment feature allows IT to use one image for all hardware and combine it with different, pre-approved sets of drivers and applications. By deploying a modular “golden image” from scratch, the system is reset to the intended baseline, eliminating any prior, unauthorized configuration changes before anyone ever even uses the machine.

Fixing: Restoration and Remediation

An ounce of prevention is worth a pound of cure, so the above Deploy features are critical to making IT systems more efficient and cost effective. However, no set of features can make configuration drift impossible. So if drift does occur, Deploy is there to provide centralized tools to return the machine to its desired state.

Remote control and unattended access allow IT to quickly and remotely connect to a drifted machine to diagnose and fix the issue or, more commonly, reset the environment. This eliminates the need for IT staff to manually visit desks, ensuring faster remediation and consistency across fixes.

When IT staff detect drift in a specific group of workstations, they can select those machines and execute a bulk operation with a single click. This instantly applies the fix across the entire subset, eliminating manual intervention and ensuring uniformity.

Amelioration: Detection and Insight

Configuration drift isn’t binary; it’s not a thing that just happens or doesn’t happen. It’s a state that reveals itself through a number of symptoms, not all of which are devastating in and of themselves. But those symptoms can always pop up, so countering drift isn’t so much an action as a practice — something effective IT teams are consistently involved with. And Faronics Deploy helps with this practice, empowering IT staff to be proactive, offering visibility into the current state of devices.

The comprehensive hardware and software inventory provides a baseline of what staff should install. IT can use this data to spot machines where the software inventory or OS version differs from the defined standard. Furthermore, the intuitive console allows IT to see pending updates, patch statuses and configuration details in the Smart Grid.

Manage Drift With Deploy

Want to learn more about how Faronics Deploy can cure the drift that’s ailing your IT system? Contact us today to get started.