In today’s world of personal data, privacy concerns, malware and plain bad luck, having access to a production system and production data is simply a Bad Idea. And not just for yourself, but everyone. The developers, the database admin, the operations team – none of them should have access to production.

So how can we do that, and at the same time maintain our high rate of releases, our agility and our sanity?

We will go though some principles to follow and show you in practice how you can create your environment, lock it down and update it, all without human intervention. We will also see how you can monitor the environment for unauthorized changes. How you can have “emergency hatches” for when you really need access, but in a controlled fashion. Examples will be for Microsoft Azure, but the principles are universal.

In short, if you want to keep your production environment and production data at an arm’s length, but still so what you need when you need it, this is your session.