Best Practices

• Highly consider SQL database mirroring for high availability and disaster recovery.

• Ensure that network links are at least 1Gb and ideally have less than 1ms of latency (possibly up to 10ms in some scenarios) if using synchronous database mirroring. In addition, make sure there are no spikes in WAN traffic and ensure that there are guaranteed levels of service on the network links.

• Be sure that the hardware of the SQL principal and mirror servers are equivalent and ideally identical.

• For the best overall data security for a SharePoint environment, use SSL Certificates for client traffic to SharePoint, use IPsec for communications between farm servers, and use SQL TDE for encryption in storage.

• Use a separate SQL instance for TDE-encrypted databases so that the encrypted tempdb from that instance won’t affect the performance of other databases.

• Back up and store the TDE Certificate and private key in a safe, fault-tolerant place, but ensure that that place is separate from the database backups themselves.

• Publish the AD RMS SCP in AD only after it has been fully tested, because it will be made immediately available within Office clients for client use once published.