13. The Risks of Change

A robust change management process is necessary before making changes to systems.

• Changes should be tested in model environments before applying them to a production (live) environment.
• Even with extensive planning and testing, unintended consequences can occur.

Rollback Plan

• A rollback is restoring the system to the state it was in before the change was made.
• This returns the system to a point where it was known to be working properly.
• Before introducing changes, patches must be reviewed and tested, and the previous configuration must be restorable.

Testing Challenges

• Maintaining a separate testing environment can be a logistical challenge for many organizations.
• Some organizations do not have separate production and testing environments to properly test patches and updates.
• In such cases, they may rely on vendor third-party testing to certify new software releases based on a generic set of data.

Importance of Rollback

• A rollback plan is important in all environments.
• It is especially critical for organizations that cannot fully test changes before deployment.