Are you prepared for the deployment of a new program? Are you sure new policies on the web firewall won't make any negative impact on your business? This paper dedicates to describe the problems in deploying & testing application in enterprises and the corresponding way to work out.
The only thing that is constant is change.
Technology is evolving along with the needs for business. New technologies, new applications, new hardware devices, new processes and new concepts have been introduced into IT systems. Therefore, a static IT environment does not exist - there are always be new friends coming into our company and if you don't practice due care obligation and detect any potential followed impact, they bring you surprises sometimes.
Changes bring you potential impacts and negative impact is dangerous.
ExampleA new firewall has been installed in a company which runs its business over online stock software, and all clients connect to an internal server running this program in the DMZ. The administrator believes the internal server use TCP port 1070 only for communication so he allowed only this type of traffic and set the firewall up there in the night. The next day, people complain the server does not work.
The administrator is very much confused. He had tested and confirmed the clients can absolutely connect to the server. Why does not it work?
It turns out the server needs to have DNS resolve and then be able to fetch information from public server on the external side. However, the administrator had blocked all traffic except TCP port 1070.
The administrator fixed it finally but the loss is huge.
The negative impact is hard to detect for most SMB companies.
Lack of tech force, It is a common problem when facing the negative impact brought by IT system changes.
In most cases, SMB companies had to face the problem that not enough tech force is there for IT systems. It is not cost-efficient to hold an expert level tech force for a long term in the SMB Company - they barely work and being leisure from time to time. And some SMB are not able to afford that.
Lack of understanding to companies' business, this is not rare in Out-Sourcing.
These outsource service companies may have experts in their teams, but they provide support to different industries and companies. It is hardly they can offer service close to your business processes.
Therefore, more or less, SMB companies have to face the consequences of potential impact which comes with changes, because they can hardly detect what is coming with the inevitable changes.
A test environment and an engineer who is familiar with both business process and technical transactions are required to find out what the impact would be, when a change is applied. Build an environment, and then map it to the real productive environment by simulation; apply the change to the simulated mirror; observe the consequence.
By observing the impact brought by changes, it is possible to speculate what would happen to the real IT system, like:
You can observe the traffic flow in the test environment and thus foresee what would happen in the productive one. Thus prepare and implement the correlated solution before incident take place and result in a huge lost.
Colasoft Capsa is network sniffing tool which can offer you the ability to capture network traffic and analyze them in a frame level. It can be used to test changes in the network and record the packets generated/pass through the changed point.
All in all, Colasoft Capsa can be a reliable tool when observing tests for changes, and help prepare countermeasures to solve the negative impact brought by the changes.
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