Lack of control over the release process, poor collaboration between teams, and manual deployments lead to poor quality releases at a cost to the business.

Our Advice

Critical Insight

• Manage risk. Release management should stabilize the IT environment. A poorly designed release can take down the whole business. Rushing releases out the door leads to increased risk for the business.
• Quality processes are key. Standardized process will enable your release and deployment management teams to have a framework to deploy new releases with minimal chance of costly downtime further down the production chain.
• Business must own the process. Release managers need oversight of the business to remain good stewards of the release management process.

Impact and Result

• Be prepared with a release management policy. With vulnerabilities discovered and published at an alarming pace, organizations have to build a plan to address and fix them quickly. A detailed release and patch policy should map out all the logistics of the deployment in advance, so that when necessary, teams can handle rollouts like a well-oiled machine.
• Automate your software deployment and patch management strategy. Replace tedious and time-consuming manual processes with the use of automated release and patch management tools. Some organizations have a variety of release tools for various tasks and processes to ensure all or most of the required processes are covered across a diverse development environment.
• Test deployments and monitor your releases. Larger organizations may have the luxury of a test environment prior to deployment, but that may be cost prohibitive for smaller organizations. If resources are a constraint, roll out the patch gradually and closely monitor performance to be able to quickly revert in the event of an issue.