Changes
should not go into production without change approval because of the following
critical reasons:
1. Risk Management & Stability
- Unapproved
changes can introduce unexpected
failures, downtime,
or degrade system performance.
- Production
environments should remain stable
and reliable to meet SLAs
and business continuity
needs.
2. Security & Compliance
- Unauthorized
changes can introduce security
vulnerabilities, data
leaks, or misconfigurations.
- Many
industries (finance, healthcare, etc.) require compliance
with regulations like ISO
27001, SOC 2, HIPAA, PCI DSS, which mandate change controls.
3. Traceability & Auditing
- Change
approvals create an audit
trail of who made the change, when, and why.
- This
helps with root cause analysis
and forensic investigations
in case of incidents.
4. Operational Efficiency &
Coordination
- Change
approvals ensure that all
stakeholders (Dev, Ops, Security, Compliance, etc.) are
aware of the change.
- This
prevents conflicts, disruptions, or
untested dependencies from breaking production.
5. Rollback
& Recovery
- Approved
changes should have a rollback
plan or disaster
recovery strategy in case something goes wrong.
- Without
change approvals, teams may struggle to quickly
revert breaking changes, leading to extended outages.
6. Incident
Reduction & Service Reliability
- Many
high-profile outages
happen due to unauthorized
or improperly tested changes in production.
- A
structured approval process ensures that changes are reviewed, tested, and properly scheduled
to reduce incidents.
7. Aligns
with DevOps & SRE Best Practices
- Even
in high-velocity CI/CD environments,
organizations use progressive
delivery techniques (feature flags, blue-green
deployments, canary releases) with change
control policies to minimize risk.
- Site
Reliability Engineering (SRE) principles emphasize blameless change management, automation,
and controlled rollouts.
Bottom Line:
Skipping change approval is a huge risk to security, stability, and compliance.
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