Guardian: complete visibility when working with staging environments

Staging environments are a vital element of software testing and deployment, the point at which code, updates and builds are integrated and tested against something as close to a production environment as possible. Ideally, they would be identical, but that’s typically not the case.

Get these steps right and you can have confidence that your software will work as expected when it is deployed. However, in reality there will always be some differences between the staging environments and the production environment. For example, a staging environment is often dependent on the infrastructure developers work with, and typically they will have full control here, whereas a production environment is ‘locked down’. This means that testing will not be 100% accurate.

These differences introduce a significant risk: however careful your testing, defects can be released into the production environment. Resulting in business, operational, and environmental issues. For example this can impact security, data integrity, reliability of services leading to a business impact on customer trust. Do you know and can you measure the differences across your staging environments?

Complete visibility

Getting a good understanding of these differences between the staging and production environments can help you to identify where defects could creep in. But finding these differences can be time-consuming and labour intensive to do.

Which is where Cloudhouse Guardian comes in. Guardian gives a surface view of what is the same and what is different across your staging and production environments, allowing you to check that everything is configured as you wanted. The simple user interface shows the differences and similarities between the two so you can quickly and easily compare them.

What’s more, if you are running regular or ongoing updates, Guardian also allows you to create policies to ensure your preferred configuration criteria are adhered to each time. These policies may be your own or for example as defined by the Center for Internet Security (CIS) allowing you to achieve best practice configuration.

This oversight from Guardian can give you confidence that you won’t be caught out by the unexpected. The insight ensures consistency and efficiency, reducing the risks associated with updates.

Find out more

To find out more about Guardian and how it can be used with staging environments, please contact us for a no obligation conversation.