In today's rapidly evolving digital landscape, safeguarding your business application environment is crucial. Salto, leveraging the power of DevOps methodologies, offers a robust framework for managing and protecting your configurations across various platforms like Salesforce, NetSuite, Jira, Zendesk, and Okta. This article guides you through implementing best practices to secure your environment effectively, inspired by DevOps methodologies and incorporating practices from Git's collaboration model.

1. Collaborative Change Management through Pull Requests (PRs)

Pull Requests (PRs) are at the heart of collaborative development, enabling teams to review, discuss, and refine changes before deploying and merging them. Applying this methodology to your business application change management with Salto can significantly enhance governance and control.

Manually Creating and Managing PRs

Initiate Changes: For any proposed changes in your environment, start by manually creating a deployment to an environment connected to a Git branch. This will automatically create a PR for you. You can learn more in this guide.
Seek Peer Review: Request a review from a teammate. This encourages collaboration and knowledge sharing, ensuring that every change is scrutinized and validated.
Comment and Collaborate: Use the commenting feature to discuss potential improvements or concerns regarding the changes. This fosters an environment of continuous feedback and collective ownership of the configuration. Here is a guide for GitHub. If you have a different Git provider, you can find its guide within its help pages.

2. Implementing Branch Protection

Branch protection rules play a pivotal role in maintaining the integrity of your production environment. By setting up branch protection, you can ensure that changes are thoroughly reviewed and meet your team's quality standards before deployment.

Enforcing PR Approvals

Enforcing PR Approvals by configuring branch protection rules in your version control system mandates PR approvals before deployment and merging, ensuring a rigorous review process. Establishing a mandatory review policy that requires one or more team members to approve changes in a PR helps catch potential issues early and reinforce deployment quality.

Here is a guide to help you get started.

3. Monitoring Direct Changes

Despite rigorous process control efforts, direct environmental changes can still occur. Monitoring these changes is crucial to ensure the integrity and security of the system. Implementing change monitoring and alert systems enables businesses to oversee their environments, quickly identifying and addressing any unauthorized or unplanned modifications.

Change Monitoring and Alerts

Track Direct Changes: Utilize Salto's comprehensive monitoring capabilities to track any direct changes made within the environment. This feature is essential for quickly identifying unauthorized or unplanned modifications, allowing for swift action to mitigate potential risks.
Alerting Mechanisms: Implement email or Slack alerts to notify relevant team members immediately when direct changes are detected. This ensures a prompt response to any deviations from established processes, helping to maintain system integrity and compliance.

Best Practices for Managing Changes

Promote Changes Across Environments: Typically, changes should be made in a lower (non-production) environment and then propagated through higher environments until they reach production. This practice allows for thorough testing and review, ensuring changes do not adversely affect the production environment.
Understanding 'Out of Band' Changes: 'Out of Band' changes refer to modifications made directly in the production environment, bypassing the standard process of promoting changes through development and testing environments. These changes can introduce significant risks.
Why 'Out of Band' Changes Are Problematic: Implementing changes directly in the production environment without following the proper channels undermines the system's stability and reliability. It bypasses critical checks and balances designed to catch errors, leading to potential system failures and security breaches. Moreover, 'Out of Band' changes complicate troubleshooting and auditing, making it difficult to track the source of issues or understand the current system state.

Follow the guidelines outlined in this guide to monitor changes in your environment effectively. By adhering to these practices, you can minimize the risk of unauthorized changes, maintain system integrity, and ensure a reliable and secure environment for your operations.

4. Automation and Validation

Automating validations and incorporating tests are critical for ensuring the reliability and stability of your deployments. Salto's integration with business applications allows you to automate these checks seamlessly.

Automated Validations and Testing

Run Validations: Automate the process of running validations on your configurations. For Salesforce, this could include running Apex tests to verify the functionality before deployment. Currently, only Salesforce supports validations.
Deployment Conditions: Configure your CI/CD pipeline to automatically block deployments if any warnings or errors are detected in the deployment preview. This ensures that only changes that meet your quality and safety criteria are deployed to the production environment.

Avoiding Deployment Errors

Enforce Deployment Standards: By setting up automated checks and validations, you can disable the option to deploy changes that do not meet your predefined criteria. This step is crucial in protecting your environment from potential disruptions caused by faulty configurations.

We’ve prepared a collection of guides to help you set up CI/CD with Salto.

Conclusion

Protecting your business application environment requires a combination of collaborative practices, strict governance, monitoring, and automation. By leveraging Salto and DevOps methodologies, organizations can establish a robust framework for managing their application configurations securely and efficiently. Implementing these practices will safeguard your environment, enhance team collaboration, improve deployment quality, and ensure a seamless and safe change management process.