Every enterprise needs to tailor the use of standards and practices to suit its individual equirements. All three standards/practices covered in this guide can play a very useful part, CobiT and ISO/IEC 27002 helping to define what should be done and ITIL providing the how for service management aspects. The growing adoption of IT best practices has been driven by a requirement for the IT industry to better manage the quality and reliability of IT in business and respond to a growing number of regulatory and contractual requirements. There is a danger, however, that implementation of these potentially helpful best practices can be costly and unfocused if they are treated as purely technical guidance. To be most effective, best practices should be applied within the business context, focusing on where their use would provide the most benefit to the organisation. The briefing applies generally to all IT best practices but focuses on three specific practices and standards that are becoming widely adopted around the world. It has been updated to reflect the latest versions: • ITIL V3—Published by the UK government to provide a best practice framework for IT service management • CobiT 4.1—Published by ITGI and positioned as a high-level governance and control framework • ISO/IEC 27002:2005—Published by the International Organization for Standardization (ISO) and International Electrotechnical Commission (IEC) and derived from the UK government’s BS 7799, renamed ISO/IEC 17799:2005, to provide a framework of a standard for information security management