Vendors and consultants often recommend that their customers have multiple logical environments (i.e. development, test, training, etc) to properly support an enterprise application during its lifecycle. This is required in some cases but impractical in others. Don't waste money setting up and maintaining unnecessary environments.

The Challenges of Having Multiple Environments

Companies often maintain and support up to six separate logical environments for a single application. These can include development, sandbox, testing, training, staging, and production environments. Synchronizing and supporting these environments is hard work that sometimes can be avoided. The challenges of maintaining multiple environments are:

• Requires additional spending in hardware, software, and personnel to maintain, administer, and support the applications.
• It's quite hard to keep the environments completely homogeneous (i.e. similar hardware, identical software, data, and configuration). Virtualization technologies can help minimize this issue but they require an additional investment.
• Requires a request promotion process that often slows down the delivery of new functionality to the user...