Gold Configuration Environment
Overview
The Gold Environment is most commonly a Tier-1 Cloud-Hosted Environment. No development is created in this environment and it is simply used to store data for the “Golden Configuration”.
The dataset should consist of only static data.
Purpose
The advantage to having a Gold Environment with Gold Configuration data allows the configuration to be signed off in this environment. This configuration should NOT contain any master data which is considered data that “moves, or changes”. A data migration environment is used to migrate master data for example customers and suppliers is considered to be migrated data and not configuration data.
Having the company-specific data allows the entire gold database to be exported and imported into other environments for baselining conference room pilots, mock go lives and go-lives. The database can be used to hydrate a target UAT (User Acceptance Testing) environment and ultimately for mock go-live cutover activities by then moving that database from UAT to Production.
Database Movement Operations
The gold configuration database can be backed up and imported into Microsoft Lifecycle Services (LCS). Thereafter, it is possible to use Maintenance Tools from within LCS to import that database backup into another environment by selecting the “Move Database” feature as below:
