Local Group Policy Overrides

Question

Local Group Policy Overrides

Thomas Evans 0

We are managing a small office of 15 people that isn't connected to a cloud MDM or an on-premises domain controller yet. If I manually configure local security policies on a master Windows Pro machine, what is the fastest way to export that local security policy file and apply it across the remaining 14 machines without doing it by hand ?

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Answer 1

The cleanest way to do this without a domain is to use secedit to export and re-apply the local security policy as a template file.

On your “master” machine, export the policy with:

secedit /export /cfg C:\Temp\SecurityBaseline.inf

This creates a full local security policy template (user rights, security options, etc.). Copy that .inf file to the other machines, then apply it with:

secedit /configure /db C:\Windows\Security\Database\secedit.sdb /cfg C:\Temp\SecurityBaseline.inf /overwrite

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This will enforce the same policy set consistently across each device. You can push this remotely using something simple like PsExec or a PowerShell loop if admin shares are enabled, instead of manually touching each machine.

Just be aware this only covers local security policy, not all settings (it won’t include things like advanced firewall rules or registry-based preferences), so you may still need a separate script for anything outside what secedit manages.