A year of better practices

As 2008 winds down, what strikes me is how few big new technology trends emerged this year that directly affect IT professionals, the sole exception being cloud computing (although we’re still in the arguing-about-the-definition phase). Virtualization is going like gangbusters, but that started a couple of years ago. Likewise Green IT and SOA, which lost steam rather than gained momentum.

Perhaps IT needed some time to digest the wave of new technology that landed over the past few years, from enterprise service busses to the latest data leak prevention scheme. Whatever the reason, when we’re not struggling to keep the lights on, with less distraction from shiny new tech we can devote a little more time to honing best practices.

We could all use a little more of that. In this week’s Off the Record, and anonymous reader offered a horrific tale: A recently laid off employee pulled a dirty trick that brought in the FBI. A simple best practice — closing his account right away — could have stopped disaster before it started.

Contributor Logan Harbaugh provides advice on making another best practice less painful: backing up data. As Logan points out, few IT shops want to shell out the capital investment for disk-to-disk backup or remote replication these days. So why not turn to a cloud-based remote backup service instead?

Another best practice, especially if you want to keep your political hide intact, is to ensure you have your ROI numbers straight when you roll out a new technology. Senior writer Tom Kaneshige points out that virtualization, for all its benefits, may not save much money, at least in the short run. The real plusses are an agile infrastructure and added business continuity.

Contributing editor Dan Tynan rounds things out with some worst practices in The Seven Deadly Sins of IT Management. Yes, all the sins are here — from lust to pride — and Dan has packed each section with lively real-world examples of exactly how not to behave. It’s a fun read and also quite instructive. If you don’t cringe a little when you read this one, then either you’re not a manager or you haven’t been one for long.

And finally, our voluble Enterprise Desktop blogger Randall Kennedy lets loose on what has become a favorite theme: the best way to perform and interpret benchmarks. Thanks to Randall, the back-and-forth over Windows 7 and its performance has been relentless. In his latest post he compares his benchmark results against apparently contradictory results from a blogger from another publication — except that Randall argues quite effectively that there’s very little contradiction at all.

Randall, making peace? It must be the season for it. Happy holidays and see you in the new year.