Change management for Pega Cloud GCP Early Access Program

This article is part of the Pega Cloud GCP Early Access Subscription Documentation.

Pegasystems provides change management for Pega Cloud environments. Changes are planned, reviewed, tested, implemented, and validated.

Responsibilities

Pegasystems is responsible for managing all changes to the Pega Cloud environments, which includes the underlying cloud infrastructure, as well as patches and upgrades to  Pega-licensed products.  Client changes to applications that are layered on top are the client’s responsibility.  Client-built applications must conform to established Pega Platform best practices and Guardrail Compliance instructions that are posted on Pega Community and provided in the Pega Platform Dev Studio.

Requesting changes

To request a Pega Cloud environment change, a client should submit a request by selecting New Request through My Support Portal (available 24 hours a day, seven days a week) and provide all relevant change plan information, materials, and supporting documentation. If the client has change requests for multiple environments, please submit a separate request for each environment.  Each request must include a complete description of the change, a change plan with at least one task, and proposed start and end dates, times, and time zone. No changes can be made that are not explicitly listed in the request.

When submitting a Cloud Change request via My Support Portal, clients must give a minimum of two hours' notice before the change is needed.  If a Cloud Change is needed sooner – due to downtime in the environment related to a Severity 1 ticket – please call the Pegasystems Support hot line for assistance from a Pegasystems representative.

If clients elect to move private or confidential data to non-production environments (sandbox or non-production mirror sandbox), they should be mindful of security best practices as described in the Security Checklist (please see Client Data Rights and Responsibilities for additional information on this Checklist).  

To protect the security of Pega Cloud client information in production environments, Pegasystems requires written authorization from a Client Security Contact for significant changes such as access level changes, data changes, and platform changes. This written authorization must give appropriate advance notice, and must provide all detail necessary to implement the change; it is specific to one request only, and must be provided by email, document, or letter.  The authorization will be attached to the Change Request as an audited record of the request.  Additionally, Pegasystems may require a signed liability release form for requests to directly access a production database.  Emergency changes (such as a service outage or critical change) which require immediate response (without the advance notice) may be made with authorization from a Pega Cloud Change Manager. 

Change requests should only be submitted for activities the client cannot perform through the Pega Platform Dev Studio. Changes required for the proper operation of cloud environments or applications (configuration file changes, Pega software upgrades, and so on) do require a request submission. Similarly, change requests for non-production environments (ex: development, test, staging, etc.) need not be reviewed by the Change Advisory Board (as they have no compliance or security impact) but should also be submitted in the change request.

Subscription changes

To change the terms of a Pega Cloud subscription (for example, to add a new Strategic Application to the configuration), please contact a Pegasystems Account Executive.

For additional details on Pega Cloud change management, which are not part of the Pega Cloud Subscription documentation, see The Change Management Process in Pega Cloud.