A.8.31 Separation of Development, Test and Production Environments
Control Objective
Development, testing and production environments shall be separated and secured.
Policy Statement
anDREa enforces absolute logical and structural segregation between its software development, quality assurance testing, staging (acceptance), and production environments. This strict partitioning prevents unauthorized code promotion, cross-contamination of environment configurations, and any accidental exposure of production research data to unvetted code or development personnel.
Environmental Segregation & Promotion Pipeline
The lifecycle of the myDRE platform code moves through four rigidly isolated execution zones, ensuring that code is continuously scrutinized before it reaches production:
[Local Development] ➔ [Testing Subnet (QA)] ➔ [Acceptance Subnet (Staging)] ➔ [Production Azure Cloud]
- Local Development Environment: Code generation and initial feature debugging are executed exclusively on the isolated local hardware endpoints of individual engineers. Developers utilize GitHub Pull Requests (PRs) to initiate code collaboration and automated validation.
- Testing Environment (QA Sandboxes): Code is pushed via automated continuous integration pipelines into an isolated Azure testing subscription. Here, dedicated Quality Assurance (QA) engineers conduct structural, functional, and security regression testing.
- Acceptance Environment (Staging): Following successful QA validation, the code build is promoted to the Acceptance environment. This platform container serves as a production-mirror sandbox where the anDREa Support & Assurance Team, alongside customer representatives (such as tenant Research Support Team members), execute comprehensive User Acceptance Testing (UAT).
- Production Environment: Once formal acceptance sign-off is achieved, the code is deployed to the production Microsoft Azure cloud environment via authorized release pipelines. The Support & Assurance Team immediately performs automated and manual post-deployment smoke testing to verify core functionality.
Access Governance & Data Isolation Guardrails
To maintain structural security across these boundaries, anDREa implements strict identity and data access controls:
- Restricted Production Access: By default, software developers and engineering personnel possess zero administrative or structural access to the production myDRE environment or tenant subscriptions. An engineer can only access an active workspace if explicitly invited as a project member by that specific Workspace Accountable for a time-bound, audited technical purpose (see A.08.22 - Segregation of networks).
- Data Sanitization and Air-Gapping: All development, QA testing, and acceptance verification are executed using entirely synthetic or non-sensitive mock datasets. Production research data is never introduced, handled, or touched within any development or testing environment (see A.08.29 - Security testing in development and acceptance).
- Change Pipeline Integrity: Direct modification of code, database schemas, or infrastructure configurations inside the production environment is technically blocked. All changes must originate in development and pass through the formalized pipeline gates (see A.08.25 - Secure development life cycle).