This section provides information about procedures and tasks that enable Microsoft Provisioning System (MPS) to maintain a high level of performance and a secure configuration.

You can learn the following best practices for MPS:

• MPS Database Maintenance - Describes how to manage the Audit Log file by configuring which transactions you want to save to the Audit Log and what kinds of data you want to pass for these transactions.
  
• MPS Account Password Protection - Includes recommendations for changing the password on MPS service accounts. Also specifies the names of all MPS service accounts and the locations where you can either manually change the passwords for these accounts or automate the change by using the MPS Deployment Tool.
  
• Provisioning Environment Verification - Includes the recommendation for periodically verifying your provisioning environment components with the MPS Deployment Tool.
  

Best practice requires securing infrastructure components, such as a Provisioning Engine. Because you can create custom provisioning requests and extend MPS through developing namespaces and providers, it is important to learn about the authentication models and security contexts available within the system. The remainder of this section introduces key concepts and planning tasks essential to being able to secure your deployment.