Ben Rothke on Best Practices
Best practices look at what everyone else is doing, crunch numbers—and come up with what everyone else is doing. Using the same method, one would conclude that best practices for nutrition mandates a diet high in fat, cholesterol and sugar, with the average male being 35 pounds overweight.
Writes Ben Rothke in a short, incisive article [link to http://www.eweek.com/article2/0,4149,1417450,00.asp no longer works] for eweek. Go read it now.
Ben is somewhat offbase in his definition of best practices. In my experience best practices are not defined by industry averages, but rather by what some organization e.g. The Big Three (Four? Five?), SANS uses as their baseline recommendations.
Using Ben’s analogy, best practices would include automatically clicking on all email attachments, and only periodically remember to update patches and AV.
Best Practices however, as a concept is almost as overused as Best of Breed. In both cases, they are only useful at a base level since both are way too general like Ben says.
-DM
True.
I would describe best practices as what we all say we should do.
The norm is somewhat bleaker. You describe the norm, my neighbor is an example of ‘best practices’ he runs endlessly and eats less than most of us and food that is far more nutritious.
Look forward to reading your blog – glad to have found you.