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Question:

What are the industry best practices related to physical maintenance of IT servers?

Answer:

It’s not difficult to develop and understand best practices for maintaining IT server security, but physical maintenance is equally important for several reasons:

1. Proper on-going maintenance of equipment helps ensure continued operations, which is imperative in today’s digitally-driven work environment.
2. In the event of an outage or equipment failure, the repair process is not hampered by a disorganized server room.
3. Commitment to organization and order in even the smallest of details reflects well on an organization, especially in the event of an audit.

One recommendation is to develop a color-coding system to organize server wires and use racks with cable management “teeth” or ties to bundle wires and prevent damage. Other best practices include building a checklist during server configuration to ensure that people-based controls are executed when needed. By color-coding wires, technicians will easily be able to distinguish between production server, vital network equipment and workstation wires and quickly identify and correct any issues.