In a small IT department where individuals perform more than one role, which practice represents the greatest risk?

In a small IT department, where individuals often take on multiple roles, the practice of developers promoting code into the production environment presents the greatest risk due to the potential for insufficient oversight and separation of duties. In an ideal scenario, the development and production environments are segregated to ensure that changes are thoroughly tested and reviewed before deployment.

When developers handle both the creation and deployment of their code, there is an increased likelihood of introducing errors, security vulnerabilities, or untested features directly into production. This lack of checks and balances can lead to significant issues, such as system downtime, data corruption, or security breaches, since the developers may not be sufficiently objective in evaluating their own work.

Maintaining proper segregation of duties is a fundamental control designed to mitigate risks associated with changes in a production environment. Ensuring that a separate individual or team oversees the promotion of code can significantly reduce the risk of adverse impacts on operations.

Other roles, such as a business analyst conducting both requirements writing and functional testing or an IT manager handling systems administration, can have some inherent risks; however, they do not pose the same level of direct risk to system integrity as the ability of developers to deploy their own code to production environments. The practice of a database administrator performing data backups