Store Connection Strings On the Server

I come from a java background and when working on apps things like connection strings, web service urls and etc, where store on the server. I am curious if there is a way to do this in the .net environment? I have done some research but a lot what I find is how to manipulate the web config with out necessarily having to set up web config transforms. Ideally what we want to do is not have this in the web config, but as a server variable we can pull when needed similar to our websphere environment.