Refreshing Development from Production
One of the world's largest financial institutions has a very complex application stack that has multiple components, regions, and stakeholders that must work together to successfully develop, promote, and manage this application's lifecycle.
The Problem
Like most large enterprise applications, this customer's application stack is comprised of multiple components, such as J2EE, web servers (Apache), middleware (WebSphere), workflow, drivers, libraries, stored procedures, and operating systems. Individual business groups—depending on what environment, infrastructure component, or region—manage each of these components separately.
The Application Development team was rarely confident that when they requested a platform refresh from Production to Development that they had actually received the complete stack, and whether or not it had been configured correctly for their environment. Due to the fact that a completely separate team—for control purposes—was responsible for completing the refresh, the Application Development team had no visibility into the near-production platforms, which severely impacted their timelines, and project quality.
The Solution
SignaCert's Enterprise Trust Server™ (ETS) was able to easily model a hierarchy of components, environments, and organizational ownership. Detailing the ownership of the various components throughout the lifecycle of the application enabled the Application Development team to create references of all components and their associated release points. They then created a standard policy (a set of instructions) to scan the platforms for acceptance, enabling the Application Development group to have visibility into which releases for each component of the stack were present, prior to accepting the platform refresh.
is accurately refreshed to development.
Results
Prior to SignaCert, the acceptance of a platform refresh was a manual process performed by multiple groups. By automating the platform acceptance test, the Application Development team could:
- Accurate Replication—Increased accuracy of platform inspection, by having an automated procedure that verified the entire platform to their expected configuration, instead of manual human-based inspection.
- Time Savings—Reduced platform acceptance procedures from many staff hours to an automated procedure, that takes 5 minutes.
- Improved Reliability—Increased predictable behavior of platform stability once in the Development and Systems Integrated Test (SIT) environments.