Athenahealth Transfers System Setting Management from Group Policy to Puppet

Challenge

As part of Athenahealth’s digital transformation, they moved to a service-driven model. The infrastructure-as-a-service team was tasked with maturing configuration management and enhancing security and compliance. They needed to move to a more consistent approach to security and compliance that would work in and out of domains, shift toward infrastructure-as-code, and improve monitoring and alerting.

Solution

Athenahealth wrote their own code as part of their internal Puppet Module to automate and simplify operational tasks. The WinPuppetTools code supports migrating computer registry policy, preference settings, and audit settings into a Puppet manifest. The WinPuppetTools code is publicly available on GitHub.

Results

Athenahealth is successfully moving from Group Policy to Puppet for configuration management and has improved security, compliance, monitoring, and alerting.

We were already using Puppet in other areas and felt it would be the best for meeting our new configuration management goals.

Shane Smith, Site Reliability Engineer, Athenahealth

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