What to keep in mind when reading a best practice

When developing an technical deployment architecture for a company it is always good to base your architecture on the best practices. Best practices are offered by a number of sources and when reading the best practices it is good to understand where they are coming from and if there is a "second agenda" in the best practices that is offered.

In general the best best practice is are to be found by independent organizations that provide industry best practices. Next to this a good source of best practices can be the numerous blogs that can be found online. a lot of software vendors do provide best practices and also implementation companies do provide best practices. One thing you have to remember though is that there is always the change that the people from the software vendor and/or an implementation partner do write a best practice without keeping in mind a specific business case.

In real world deployments every additional piece of software and hardware is an additional cost on the budget. This additional cost in the budget should be accompanied with a valid business reason. When someone writes without keeping that in mind, or even with the intention to add additional and costly features to the design, the costs of your deployment architecture might not weigh up to the business benefits and needs.

When reviewing a best practice always try to keep the following things in mind:
 - Is the goal used in the best practice in line with my business need
 - Is this best practice possibly written with a second agenda
 - Is this best practice including higher demands then in my situation
 - Is his best practice only focusing on a single vendor solution stack and are the options to include solutions from other vendors.

If you keep the above point in the back of your mind best practices you download from software vendors are very usable.