How Unnecessary Application are eating Up your disk space and making your laptop vulnerable in the Internet world
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hello everyone my name is vijay kumar Devireddy and i am glad to have you back on my episode 28 today we are discussing about Let me ask you a question.How many applications do you have installed on your computer right now?Now I don't mean how many are currently running.But how many exist on your computer in total?Do you have five? 50? 500? Or maybe more?Each application that's installed on your device takes up valuable disk space,but more importantly, it introduces additional code and therefore additional vulnerabilities.To combat this system administers attempt to practice known as least functionality.Least functionality is the process of configuring a work station or a server to only provide essential applications and services that are required by the user.To create an environment of least functionality administrators should restrict unneeded applications, services, ports and protocols.Another method of doing this is to uninstall any unneeded applications.After all, every application that's installed on a computer must be managed, updated and it provides yet another chance for a vulnerability to be introduced into our system.Now, our computers at work are often under a process known as configuration management.Most of our personal computers though have become mess with unnecessary programs being installed and accumulated over time.For example, if you open up your programs and features section of the control panel,take a look at all of the various programs you have installed.You might surprised at just how many are on your computer.For this example this computer had 132 different programs installed that took over 400 gigabytes of disk space looking through that list, there is a lot of unnecessary programs that user could have uninstalled.As we previously mentioned, it's important to keep your programs and you software up to date.Sometimes though, new programs are installed the old version is simply not removed.Recently we updated our video editing software from Adobe Premiere 2018 to Adobe Premiere 2019 after the installation was complete we saw that both versions remained installed on the computer.To eliminate the vulnerabilities from the 2018 version we had to go back and manually uninstall it from our systems now this may be easy to do when you have a small network of just few machines.But how do you do this when you're managing a huge enterprise network? For example one network I used to manage had over 10,000 computers spread across four countries.It would have been impossible for me to send a system administrator to check the installed programs on each and every computer throughout the network.In large networks like this, preventing excessive installations is the best solution.In our corporate networks, it's common for us to create a secure baseline image that we use for all of the work stations across the company.This image will hae the operating system,the minimum applications required and strict configuration policies that are set up for all of those machines.These polices though do have to be updated and changed over time, based on changing business requirements.We can use the Microsoft's system center configuration management or the SCCM tool that allows us as admins to manage large amounts of software across the network as well as push out new configurations and policy updates to all of our PCs.
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