Change Management Policy
Document Version: 1.0
Last Updated: July 19, 2025
Owner: Engineering and Security Teams
1. Purpose
To establish standardized procedures for initiating, reviewing, approving, implementing, and documenting changes to information systems, codebases, configurations, infrastructure, and services in order to maintain system integrity, availability, and compliance with SOC 2 requirements.
2. Scope
This policy applies to all personnel and contractors involved in making changes to production systems, code repositories, cloud infrastructure, application configurations, or third-party services that may affect operations at DevSecOpsBook.
3. Policy Statements
3.1 Change Classification
- Standard Changes: Pre-approved low-risk, repeatable changes (e.g., routine patching).
- Normal Changes: Require assessment, approval, testing, and documentation.
- Emergency Changes: Must be resolved immediately due to critical failure or incident and documented retrospectively.
3.2 Change Request and Review
- All changes must begin with a Change Request (CR) submitted through the designated ticketing or change management system.
- Each CR must include: purpose, scope, impact analysis, rollback plan, test results, and implementation timeline.
- A risk assessment must be conducted to determine potential impact on security, availability, and operations.
3.3 Approval Process
- All Normal and Emergency changes must be reviewed and approved by a designated Change Approver (e.g., Engineering Lead, Security Officer).
- Changes impacting regulated data or security controls require additional sign-off from the Security Team.
3.4 Testing and Validation
- Changes must be tested in a non-production environment prior to deployment.
- Automated test suites (unit, integration, security) must be executed and passed.
3.5 Implementation and Documentation
- Approved changes are deployed via automated CI/CD pipelines with access controls and audit logging enabled.
- A post-deployment verification must be conducted to confirm expected outcomes.
- All change records must be retained for at least 12 months for audit purposes.
3.6 Emergency Changes
- Must be documented within 24 hours of implementation.
- Reviewed post-implementation by the Change Advisory Board (CAB) or designated reviewer.
3.7 Separation of Duties
- Developers must not directly deploy code to production without peer review or approval.
- CI/CD pipelines must enforce least privilege and role-based access controls (RBAC).
3.8 Monitoring and Auditability
- All changes must be logged, timestamped, and linked to an approved change record.
- Change activities must be monitored continuously to detect unauthorized modifications.
4. Roles and Responsibilities
| Role | Responsibility |
|---|---|
| Requestor | Initiates the change and provides required documentation |
| Approver | Reviews and approves change requests |
| Security Team | Reviews changes for security and compliance impact |
| DevOps/Platform Team | Implements and monitors changes |
5. Exceptions
Any deviations from this policy must be documented, risk-assessed, and approved by the Head of Engineering and Security Officer.
6. Review Cycle
This policy will be reviewed at least annually or upon significant changes to infrastructure, tooling, or compliance requirements.