8.3. Policies in action

SQL Server 2008 ships with a number of predefined policies that can be imported and evaluated. These policies encapsulate best practices such as those for securing the surface area of a SQL instance. In addition to importing these policies, new policies can be created and exported to file for later use on other server instances.

In this section, we'll start off by importing an existing policy and looking at the various evaluation options. We'll then walk through the process of creating a new policy from scratch and exporting it to file.

8.3.1. Importing policies from file

In SQL Server 2005 and earlier, tools such as Best Practices Analyzer and Baseline Security Analyzer were used to periodically check a SQL Server instance ...

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