In the beginning of this section, I explained how group policies can be used to enforce standards. In a business, some of these standards apply to the entire organization, and some can be specific to departments, business units, or users/device group. Group policies allow you to apply different policies based on AD sites, domains, organization units, or groups. As an example, devices in the IT department can have different firewall settings than Sales department firewall settings.

We can create two group policies to cover these requirements and link them to a relevant organization unit. Not only the standards, but this flexible targeting also allows you to apply different system settings for a specific audience. As an example, the Sales department's map drives can be different from the HR department's map drives requirements. Group policies also has item level targeting, which can be used to go granular in finding the exact target and applying the group policies to it.