Managing Operations › Recommendations for Test Environments

Recommendations for Test Environments

CA recommends that you maintain a separate environment to test maintenance and new releases of the product. The ideal test environment includes the following:

• A separate test machine with cryptographic hardware identical to your production environment.
• Separate test primary and mirror databases.
• A test tape management system with a test-only version of the tape management catalog. This lets you test the key maintenance logic for identifying keys to remove from the CA Tape Encryption database or the CKDS, or both.
• If present, ICSF should be installed in your test environment. If you are planning to store the keys in the CKDS, it is preferable that you install a dedicated CKDS for testing purposes only.

In this test environment, you can define one or more test CA Tape Encryption tasks on the test system and you can exercise all features of the product without impacting your production environment. If you are using security protection profiles from your security system, you can create separate profiles for your test system.