Change management

In systematic cyber security work, the impact of significant changes must be assessed in advance and they must be executed in a controlled way. The consequences of unintentional changes must be assessed and efforts made to mitigate possible adverse effects.

Significant changes may include: changes in the organization, operating environment, business processes and data systems. Changes can be identified e.g. through management reviews and other cyber security work.

General rules for reviewing, approving and publishing the code have been defined and enforced.

The rules may include e.g. the following things:

• the generated code has been validated against the general safe development guidelines of the OWASP Framework
• the code has been reviewed by at least two people
• the changes have been approved by a designated, authorized user prior to publication
• the system documentation has been updated before release
• the time of publication of the changes has been chosen in accordance with the given instructions in order to minimize disruption to business processes
• the instructions needed by users have been updated before the code is released

The rules are intended to manage the risks associated with the release of new program code.

We have agreed and recorded policies to restore an earlier version of the software before implementing the releases.

Inadequate change management is a common cause of incidents for digital services.

An organization shall document the change management process that must be followed whenever significant changes are made to developed digital services or other computing services that affect cyber security. The process includes requirements e.g. for the following:

• Defining and documenting the change
• Assessing the risks and defining the necessary control measures
• Other impact assessment of the change
• Testing and quality assurance
• Managed implementation of the change
• Updating a change log