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ISMS/05-guidance/secure-change-and-deployment-guidance.md
Paul Jenkins 5eade2d99b Initial commit
2026-03-26 09:35:22 +00:00

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Secure Change And Deployment Guidance

Purpose

This guidance note helps engineering and operational teams apply the change and deployment controls consistently in a cloud-native environment.

Key Principle

The goal is not to slow change down. The goal is to make production change deliberate, traceable, and recoverable.

What Deserves More Scrutiny

Higher-risk changes usually include:

  • authentication or authorisation changes
  • changes affecting production access or secrets
  • Kubernetes or infrastructure changes
  • CI/CD pipeline changes
  • logging or monitoring changes
  • customer-impacting configuration changes

Minimum Practical Checks Before Deployment

Before a production deployment, confirm:

  • the change is reviewed and approved at the right level
  • the deployment path is the approved one
  • rollback or recovery is understood
  • monitoring exists to detect failure quickly
  • any customer or operational communication need is understood

Emergency Change Discipline

Emergency change does not mean uncontrolled change. If a shortcut is needed during an incident or outage, the record still needs to show:

  • why the shortcut was necessary
  • who made the decision
  • what was changed
  • what retrospective review is required

Evidence To Keep

Useful deployment evidence often includes:

  • change approval
  • code review or pipeline traceability
  • deployment timestamp
  • deployment owner
  • validation results
  • rollback or follow-up actions where relevant
  • ../../01-policies/change-management-policy.md
  • ../../02-standards/ci-cd-security-standard.md
  • ../../03-procedures/change-approval-procedure.md
  • ../../03-procedures/production-deployment-procedure.md