What is Best Practice?
At Smile IT we know that our efficiency is the key to keeping your business running smoothly.
We have a number of approaches that help streamline our operations, and one of the more effective is using ‘Best Practice’. This is a set of processes, standards and rules that through our experience we know to be the best way of doing things. But while it’s easy to define, implementing best practice successfully can be a little trickier.
Ultimately, best practices form the foundation which guides how a company operates. They aren’t created out of thin air, but evolve through years of trial, error and tinkering. All the lessons we’ve learned are distilled into best practices, which remove the guesswork and provide a starting point to dealing with future challenges.
How to Successfully Implement Best Practice
The trick to success using best practice is to be flexible. No two problems are the same, just as no two clients are the same. It’s up to us to take our skills and vision and use it in combination with best practice to ensure optimum effectiveness. Agility is important.
Equally important is innovation. Our industry forges ahead everyday with new and exciting developments, and it’s important we keep up and evolve our best practices accordingly. Being comfortable is not good enough, we need to grow and adapt our best practices constantly.
Best practice is particularly effective in improving security and limiting or preventing hardware failure. A couple of examples are:
- We’re receiving more and more calls of business hacked by ransomware because one user kept a very simple password. Best practice in this case would be forcing users by technical setup to use complex passwords.
- Segregation networks: A businesses network goes down because one user brings a personal laptop with internet connection sharing turned on. This is a legit mechanism to share internet at home, but in the workplace it brings the network to its knees. To make it worse, it can take quite some time to find the offending laptop! In this instance, best practice would involve using a separate network for non-corporate devices.
Just from these two simple examples, it’s clear how best practice can help avoid frustrations and costly delays. If you’d like to know more about the best practices we employ and how they can help you, get in touch!
When he’s not writing tech articles or turning IT startups into established and consistent managed service providers, Peter Drummond can be found kitesurfing on the Gold Coast or hanging out with his family!