The Compliance and Security Connection

How You Roll Out Your Applications and Their Upgrades Has A Lot to Do with System Uptime

This past Wednesday, we hosted a webinar with StackSafe on "The Influence of application selection on Testing and Change Management."

In this session, Dennis Powell, StackSafe's Senior Product Manager, and Shahzad Hussain, a Senior Systems Engineer with Ecora Software, discussed the following:

• Three main organizational approaches to change management and testing
• Why change management adoption can be more difficult in high stress environments
• The positive role downtime expenses play in the adoption of testing and change management processes
• The types of organizations that tend to have the most "laissez-faire" attitude towards change management
• How multiple operating systems can nearly double the cost of unplanned downtime

Today, Dennis shared more of his thoughts from this presentation in a post called, "IT's About Uptime."

If you'd like to see the presentation in its entirety, you can register and download it here.

While much of the presentation focused on environments where applications are actually developed, there are also plenty of challenges related to the deployment or third-party applications or upgrades that should be considered. In the latter portion of the presentation, Shahzad gives some examples of the types of configuration reports you'll want to be able to generate to ensure that any application, patch or service pack are upgraded on every appropriate system in your environment and how to ensure that the upgrade didn't cause additional, unanticipated changes that could render other applications inoperable because they share common dll files, as an example, that were removed when the application or upgrade was deployed.

If you are looking for this type of solution, or need a way to ensure your test environment is accurately configured to reflect your production environment, request a personal demonstration of Ecora Auditor Pro and see if will answer your configuration audit or compliance reporting questions.

Contributed by Mark Tordoff

Is Most Recent BlackBerry Outage Strike Three For Failing to Test System Changes?

This is the week that pitchers and catchers report to Spring Training for the 2008 Major League Baseball season. It seems only appropriate to use a baseball analogy to describe this week's latest BlackBerry outage.

According to The BlackBerry Beat, "The number of BlackBerry users worldwide has now passed 12 million", as of the end of the third quarter in 2007. Yet, for those 12 million users, their phones were rended useless for at least the second time in a year on Monday. According to an article on eWeek.com, "Reuters reported that Bryan Simpson, RIM support account manager, sent an e-mail to BlackBerry users late in the afternoon about the 'critical severity outage.' Simpson said in the e-mail the outage was affecting all enterprise customers and users of the Americas network."

According to a blog on CNET News.com, there were reports of users being temporarily cut off from BlackBerry service popping up all over the web back on September 7th. According to the blog, "Silicon Alley Insider got this statement from RIM: 'Some customers using BlackBerry Internet Service experienced a delay this afternoon in sending or receiving e-mail. The issue has since been resolved and no messages were lost. RIM continues to investigate the matter. Service for BlackBerry Enterprise Server customers was not impacted. RIM apologizes to customers for any inconvenience.'"

The bigger incident goes back to April 18, 2007, when BlackBerry users were without email for almost 12 hours. At the time, RIM Co-CEO Jim Balsillie had told eWeek, "It shouldn't have happened, and it won't happen again. It wasn't a corruption of any form of the infrastructure, and that's very important. It shouldn't have happened, and it won't happen again."

In a quote from the International Herald Tribune yesterday, Balsillie, in an interview at the Mobile World Congress said, "At the core, virtually all these things tend to happen on service upgrades."

This is very similar to the explanation provided for the April 2007 outage too. Which leads me to question the commitment RIM has really made to establish an effective testing environment to ensure service upgrades don't cause this kind of massive disruption.

Recently, Ecora Software and StackSafe have recently held two webinars on this very subject.  StackSafe contracted with Research Edge to develop some intriguing data linking downtime to immature change management and improving change management through better testing.  Both of these are available for viewing on-demand from the Ecora website.

It is clear that RIM hasn't completely bought in to the value of testing, even with headline-grabbing outages. If you're struggling to convince some of our senior management or board members of the value of having a testing environment that mirrors the configuration of our production environment, I encourage you to watch both of these presentations, request the research documents from StackSafe, and request a trial of Ecora Auditor Pro 4.5 to learn how you can ensure your testing environment configuration accurately reflects  that of your production environment.

Contirbuted by Mark Tordoff