Microsoft Word Hardware Reconfiguration Methodology V final2

Approval process

At this point, once all tests have been appropriately conducted according to requirements, time constraints, available testing resources, documented, and troubleshooted (if necessary) an overall outcome should be apparent. Regardless if the outcome is positive or negative a case should be made why a set of changes (i.e. update/upgrade) should or should not be deployed. Using the objectively written documentation as well as overall assessment put together by technical personnel management can make an informed decision about whether or not to proceed with a deployment. The importance and quality of the documentation provided to management cannot be overstated, as its decision will be largely based on the conclusions and findings found within the documentation. Once approval has been given to deploy, a deployment plan should be developed and a course of action for reaccredidation and recertification put into place.

7. Deployment

Once all required tests have been conducted, documented, and approved the update and/or upgrade can be deployed onto operational systems and networks. However, there is much planning that remains to be done in order to determine which systems the modifications are to be deployed onto and the order of operation and priority. It will also be important to coordinate deployment efforts with appropriate IT personnel so that they are available for deploying the approved changes as well as troubleshooting if necessary. Other issues such as reaccreditation and recertification are examined in this section.

1. Backing up

Prior to deploying an approved changes onto operational systems and networks full backups should be conducted so that if necessary system states can be rolled back if one or more system deployments should go amiss. Although the approved changes have been thoroughly tested in a controlled laboratory environment the possibility exists that some type of failure could occur during the deployment. Such a failure could result in network-wide disruptions potentially leading to the entire unavailability of services and capabilities. Therefore, by backing up any system that may be affected by the deployment it will be possible to restore them to their original state. A backup and restoration methodology can be found in Section 3 of this report.

2.