T 2.138 Poor recovery options for patch and change management

The process by means of which deleted or damaged data, applications or certain configurations are reconstructed, for example by reinstalling data from a data backup, is referred to as recovery. As complications can occur time and time again after complex patches and changes have been distributed, a restore point should always be defined in advance. This restore point can be returned to in case of an emergency and productive operations ensured.

If no recovery options are provided when distributing changes or if the restore routines of the software used are not effective or not adequately effective, the negative effects of improperly updated software cannot be corrected promptly. The related failure of the IT infrastructure can cause significant damage for the organisation.

In general, the affected systems can be recovered promptly in order to limit the damage. Inadequate or a lack of options for prompt recovery might result in particularly high consequential damage in this case.

Example:

• When updating a database application during the patch and change process, its configuration file is overwritten. During the update, it turns out that the updated database application is not compatible with the web applications that are to access the database. This problem cannot be eliminated promptly. Since the old software version together with its configuration was not saved for recovery and a new configuration must be created taking a lot of time and effort, the database and also the important web applications fail for a longer period of time.