Liability Waiver.docx
¶ Summary and Background Info
The intent of this document is to handle scenarios where we're working on a project where in some rare cases Clients will only give us access to their ERP or other major business software, that is in a production environment. Typically, we are communicating how critical it is that we work in a testing environment, emphasizing that there are major risks with working outside a sandbox or other non-production environment to test our integration or other development work, prior to progressing that work into a production environment.
While this is rare, we are currently being pressed by a client that is asking us to work in the production environment and we would like to create a simple document that formally adds another artifact to reinforce, in these situations, that this is a very large risk and although we'll do everything in our power not to realize the potential downside, it's very likely there will be production issues in that scenario. In particular, here are the main items we would like to confirm they understand and are signing off that they completely understand that the responsibility would not be "on us" if they occur:
- Working in production can cause data changes and updates to occur within production and it's possible that major data changes can impact other records outside of the scope of the integration. In the process of conducting development efforts, it's not the intention, but it's possible for there to be a logic error within a single integration and this can cause data loss or data corruption, etc.
- It's possible that doing development within a production environment can impact the environment's performance and even can potentially cause the environment to become inaccessible if there are any issues.
- It's possible for the production environment to house sensitive data, such as HIPAA data, PII or other sensitive information. As a result, working in production may by its very nature, require extra steps to ensure that we respect the data security and compliance steps. This added work could require substantial additional time and timeline to properly adhere to these requirements in production vs. working in a sanitized environment. It's also probable there could be a violation of these compliance requirements as well.