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Chef Desktop

Desktop Management and Compliance

Empowering IT Resource Managers through automation to improve efficiency while reducing risk across IT resources.

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Improve Efficiency While Reducing Risk Across IT Resources

Chef Desktop allows IT resource managers to automate the deployment, management, and secure maintenance of any large fleet of IT resources – such as laptops, desktops, and kiosk workstations – from a centralized location. With Chef Desktop, organizations can gain control over IT resources, ease the management burden, and ensure compliance to minimize risk.

Chef Desktop Key Benefits

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Gain control over IT resources

Apply consistent, flexible policy-driven configuration and maintain visibility into fleet-wide status.

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Drive efficiency through automation

Automate tasks, eliminate time-consuming manual processes, and reduce costs for managing any large fleet of desktops and laptops.

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Reduce security and compliance risk

Maintain continuous compliance by auditing and remediating against industry standards.

Chef Desktop: Empowering IT Resource Management Automation

The rapid growth of digital business, cloud, and hybrid IT has made the need for automation as urgent as ever. Organizations are looking for ways to control and monitor their very large fleets of desktops, laptops, and kiosks in a way that promotes productivity and reduces risk.

As IT resource fleets expand, organizations must accommodate the needs of a variety of employee roles, manage different operating systems, and eliminate new security threats. But configuration is often manual, time-consuming, and error prone, with different tools and processes required for different operating systems and teams. Managing security and compliance is nearly impossible, with few opportunities to enforce policy consistently, inefficient and ineffective audits, and no easy way to gauge risk.

Applying Code-driven Automation to IT Resource Management

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Chef is a DevOps pioneer, having brought the infrastructure-as-code concept to enterprises worldwide. Chef software is in use in some of the most demanding IT environments on the planet, helping organizations deliver infrastructure and applications quickly while maintaining security. Chef Desktop applies lessons learned from agile and DevOps practices to IT resource management, enabling new levels of efficiency, scale, and risk management. Instead of point-and-click, manual configuration, desired state is defined in code, and can be reliably and repeatedly applied to the fleet. Best of all, Chef Desktop comes with the code already written, with curated content to audit and harden popular laptop and desktop operating systems. This approach helps IT resource managers gain value immediately while maintaining ultimate flexibility to meet enterprise-specific needs.

Gain Control, Efficiency, and Security with Chef Desktop

Chef Desktop is a customizable and extensible solution that allows organizations to manage their enterprise-wide IT resources (laptop, desktop, kiosk) through automation. It helps teams eliminate manual processes and gain continuous visibility into the configuration and compliance state of IT resources across the enterprise using a single tool.

Chef Desktop allows for the automation of IT resources regardless of operating system, enabling a centralized change-control process for deploying and managing the fleet. This eliminates mistakes and time wasted arising from manual processes, thereby increasing organizational velocity.

To reduce risks that naturally arise from distributed, heterogeneous IT resource fleets, Chef Desktop enables continuous compliance auditing against Center for Internet Security (CIS) benchmarks that can be tuned to enterprise- or role-specific needs. Issues can be remediated automatically or flagged for follow-up, as needed. And Chef Desktop can be flexibly deployed to address unique needs such as air-gapped environments and other non-traditional setups.

Chef Desktop Use Cases

Zero Touch Enrollment & Provisioning

Provision and enroll laptops without needing manual configuration.

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Automated Software Deployment & Management

Deploy, manage and scale changes to the entire desktop/laptop fleet.

Efficient & Tunable Policy Setting

Automatically implement config policies and fine tune for special cases.

Centralized Visibility

Consolidated single-pane dashboard across platforms.

Easy Application Rollout

Controlled, automated rollout of software updates.

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Auditability & Traceability

Transparency of known state of fleet for easy audit and traceability of changes.

Chef Desktop Core Features

IT Resource Management Automation through Code

Chef Desktop automates once manual and time consuming tasks like configuring and deploying fleets of laptops, desktops and kiosks. Extend the organization’s DevOps automation practices to the configuration and continued management of your laptop/desktop fleet in a single tool for macOS, Windows, and Linux platforms.

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	CIS Benchmark	Version
Apple OSX	10.12, 10.11, 10.10, 10.9, 10.8, 10.6, 10.5
Apple macOS	10.13
CentOS – Workstation	8, 7, 6
Microsoft Windows	10, 8.1, 8, 7
Microsoft Windows – BitLocker	10, 8.1, 8, 7
Red Hat Enterprise Linux – Workstation	8, 7, 6
Ubuntu Linux – Workstation	16.04

Chef Premium Content to Jump Start Adoption

Chef Desktop leverages Chef Premium Content that include cookbooks with curated resources to support basic use cases and supporting test profiles. Chef Desktop provides audit profiles for CIS benchmarks for different platforms including Windows 10 and Linux, among others. Chef Desktop also includes remediation content to enable automated remediation and maintain continuous compliance.

Learn more about Chef Premium Content

Consolidated Fleet Visibility Dashboard

A specially tailored desktop management centric dashboard allows organizations to gain deep insights into the state of their IT resource (laptop, desktop, kiosk) fleets. The Chef Desktop management dashboard enables IT resource managers to maintain continuous visibility into the configuration status, drill down into different views, pre-group like information, check on IT resource usage, current status or any error, and correct any necessary configuration drift.

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Continuous Compliance Monitoring

With Chef Desktop, IT resource managers can consistently enforce security based on industry standards, such as Center for Internet Security (CIS) benchmarks. Users can also create custom profiles to meet any enterprise role-specific infrastructure or compliance policies so IT resource managers are able to detect security or compliance issues and automatically correct them to maintain continuous compliance.

Track and Audit Fleet Changes

Through Chef Desktop IT resource managers can adopt a change-control process at velocity for deploying and managing laptop, desktop, and kiosk fleet from a centralized location. Users can manage consistently through common CI/CD pipeline tools like Jenkins, GItHub Actions, or Azure DevOps from a single tool. Any changes made to a single IT resource or the entire fleet are all auditable and in code, easily tracked and reported on.

Rapid Vulnerability Remediation at Scale

Chef Desktop allows for correction or remediation of configuration drifts from desired state for a single device or up to the entire IT resource fleet, from a single pane of glass, covering multiple operating systems (MacOS, Windows, Linux). Organizations can monitor device compliance state and either automatically or as needed reconfigure the IT resource back into compliance.

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Chef Infrastructure Management

Chef Compliance

Chef App Delivery

Chef Desktop

Security and Compliance

Industry Solutions

Application Delivery

DevOps and Integrations

Chef Desktop

Desktop Management and Compliance

Improve Efficiency While Reducing Risk Across IT Resources

Gain control over IT resources

Drive efficiency through automation

Reduce security and compliance risk

Zero Touch Enrollment & Provisioning

Automated Software Deployment & Management

Efficient & Tunable Policy Setting

Centralized Visibility

Easy Application Rollout

Auditability & Traceability

IT Resource Management Automation through Code

Chef Premium Content to Jump Start Adoption

Consolidated Fleet Visibility Dashboard

Continuous Compliance Monitoring

Track and Audit Fleet Changes

Rapid Vulnerability Remediation at Scale

Recommended Content

Zero Trust: Endpoint Security with Chef InSpec

Distributed Work Environments are the new Reality

Learn Chef Desktop: Automated IT Resource Management

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