TO UAT OR NOT TO UAT

[stewart_Jardine]

Hi all

basically looking to settle an argument, IT bods are 100% indignant that we need 2 enviroments, 1 UAT and 1 production... I personally disagree as users only ever use prod and security profiles and model deployment put enough controls in place. People seem to have VERY STRONG feelings one way or another so..... what's your take?

[Jlochoa]

It makes sense to have UAT environment in order to ensure SAS Hotfixes are applied correctly to address an issue. After the Hotfix is verify in the UAT environment, there is confidence that the same Hotfix will be successfully deployed in the PROD environment, reducing the risk of taking down the PROD environment.

[stewart_Jardine]

Thanks for the reply, really appreciate you taking the time. I should have mentioned that we are talking about SAS VIYA on a SAS hosted cloud and managed by SAS cloud services, so they will be applying all of the patches and hot fixes

[Sajid01]

It is the industry standard practice to have three environment namely development or dev,  QA or (Quality assurance or pre production , UAT) and Production.
The order of testing would be Dev /QA/Production.
The QA and Production environment are identical in every aspect. Whatever is to be done on production has to be mandatorily tested on  the  QA. When that action (executing a job, applying patches or OS updates etc)  runs successfully and error free on the QA environment then only it is to be promoted to production. If it fails then it goes back to the development stage. 
What your IT team is insisting is perfectly reasonable and the industry standard practice. This recommendation needs to be implemented on an immediate basis without any delay.

[stewart_Jardine]

Hi, thanks for taking the time to reply, I think what I'm really struggling with is the fact that in this small company we have 50 SAS users and none of them have ever worked anywhere that has a SAS setup with multiple environments.

I am not trying to argue a point here, I am genuinely interested in hearing opinions and rationales but I don't understand why you would have those environments for any other reason than "that's what you do". It's a hosted service so we don't need to test patches and updates, my 50 users and all of their managers have no appetite to move to separate development and production environments... I may be being completely ignorant, but I can't understand it

[Patrick]

And to add to what @Sajid01 wrote: 

If you're doing anything with some business importance/criticality in Prod then you also need a 4th Disaster Recovery (DR) environment.

[stewart_Jardine]

Hi, thanks for taking the time to reply, I think what I'm really struggling with is the fact that in this small company we have 50 SAS users and none of them have ever worked anywhere that has a SAS setup with multiple environments.

I am not trying to argue a point here, I am genuinely interested in hearing opinions and rationales but I don't understand why you would have those environments for any other reason than "that's what you do". It's a hosted service so we don't need to test patches and updates, my 50 users and all of their managers have no appetite to move to separate development and production environments... I may be being completely ignorant, but I can't understand it

[Sajid01]

The next best thing then is to approach SAS itself.
Ask your Account representative to approach SAS with the question.

[Patrick]

@stewart_Jardine 

What's right for your company depends on your target operating model and what risks and outages/level of availability you can accept. Sure, you can work with a single environment as long as you've got a good backup & recovery strategy in place. 

I would assume once the environment and SAS usage matures also your company will have a need for multiple environments - like for example if you start using SAS for things like Fraud or Risk that's regulated and audited.

[SASKiwi]

IMHO, having separate SAS environments is more about managing SAS application change rather than SAS software change (patches / updates etc) and whether you have business-critical SAS applications or not. If your company only does ad-hoc analytics where the consequences of errors are low, then you could probably get away with one environment. However if your entire business depends on some of your SAS processing then a separate production environment is a must-have. If you don't, then the risks of errors in your reporting are high and so are the consequences for your business.

[Tom]

Just to throw a monkey wench (spanner?) into the discussion

I find it works much better to have a dev/test/prod lifecycle for SAS code development on the "production environment".  That way your SAS code testing does not need to worry that the version of SAS is different.  That the physical enviroment is different.

Leave the DR and system testing of new versions of SAS to IT team.  But don't let them force you to use some substandard instance of SAS to do your coding and development.

[stewart_Jardine]

Very much my thinking on the matter

[Patrick]

@Tom Agree with you for pure SAS script environments but the moment you start using SAS solutions or have critical applications that require high availability things change.

Another reason for environment separation can be that you don't want development teams having access to unmasked PII data and ideally ensure that this separation is implemented on a network level.

The OP also mentions that this is a SAS hosted Cloud environment. Afaik SAS Cloud hosting doesn't support configurations with multiple Lev's. 

[Reeza]

Questions to help answer:

1. Will you be okay if the environment is down for up to a week, while IT debugs issues with a patch/fix?
2. Will you be okay if you lose work?
3. Is there any privacy concerns with the data or applications you work with?
4. Who will be maintaining the system, yourself or the IT mods?
5. Is there a SDLC or version control system in place? Or will be there be one?

50 SAS users is actually a decent sized analytical environment. Considering each analyst typically costs around $200 a day (rough estimate, use your own) that's $10,000 a day in labour costs per day using the system. 

[stewart_Jardine]

1.sas hosted service agreement guarantees recovery in 48 hours
2. Obviously not, but we have daily backups
3. You would need to clarify that, internal or external? Internal no concerns, external definately concerns but can't see how UAT would impact that
4. SAS cloud services
5. We plan on using model manager for this