As tightly integrated as modern email systems such as Exchange are, with the advanced features of the operating system, the enterprise directory, and the client systems, even small patches, changes and upgrades have the potential to wreak havoc. Large changes can be Herculean undertakings. If proper preparation, deployment and testing procedures are not followed, disasters are quite possible.

So consider that a seemingly simple upgrade to your mail servers, or a client security patch could result in significant downtime and give you and your IT organization a “black eye” due to the failure. We don’t want that. So, how can we avoid it?

Well, you may be thinking, “I’ve got backups, and even snapshots and images of the systems I’m altering, so if things go wrong, we can roll-back to the previous state almost instantly.” That’s great, and I hope you do have good backups, and even better restore procedures in place for when things do go wrong, as they will sometimes.

But how do we ensure that we are successful, so that we don’t need to quickly restore to yesterday’s configuration? After all, if we can’t get the changes and improvements in place, that will start to look bad as well. The question is, how do you test your changes, improvements, and upgrades? How do you ensure that when you roll the changes out into your live production environment that things will work properly and as expected?

Continue reading The Importance of a Testing Environment