[jimpudar]

Sometimes you can't use production data in your staging environment, like when prevented by privacy laws. Often times developers who would not have access to production data would have permissions to view data in a staging environment...

Creating tools to produce realistic test data and also using fuzzing tools can be just as good and sometimes even better than using actual production data.

[LukeEF]

I'm having a hard time visualizing this - are we talking outside devs (consultants) or folks in a different jurisdiction who don't have rights under law, or just a company administrative policy? Agree that fake data can work well, but if you can clone the production DB, that seems a preferable and easier approach.

[dwohnitmok]

There's a variety of reasons this may happen that stem from either legal, certification, or company reasons.

Your production database may have medically-sensitive PII (or for something like SOC-2 compliance any PII at all) that cannot be shared any human (other than the original user) unless with prior approval.

Even for non-externally mandated reasons, companies may (and often do) wish to restrict access to production data by developers to minimize concerns around data exfiltration and snooping on user data by company employees.

[Silhouette]

I am struggling to think of any time it would be appropriate to clone a production database and use it for staging. That almost inevitably translates into any developer who ever deploys database-related changes having access to the contents of the production database, or at least every part of it that might ever be affected by code changes they are making. There are numerous legal, regulatory and ethical issues with granting such broad access, unless you're small enough that the few people you obviously do need to have the ability to grant full DB access happen to include anyone who is likely to change code that talks to the database. And even then it still seems like bad practice to actually grant anyone that access when it's not strictly necessary!

[ljm]

Legally. I've worked in healthcare and any direct access to production is strictly forbidden. If you can't figure it out through your logs and monitoring, and you can't reproduce in earlier environments, then the problem isn't that you don't have prod access, the problem is that your instrumentation has a gap.

Personally, I think we rely on prod access as a crutch because it's easier to expect that than it is to build a sufficient infrastructure. Cloning a prod database or allowing ad-hoc r/w access is on my list of strictly forbidden operations.

[Aeolun]

For example, we, as a company have decided on some rules around PII (personally identifyable information) that means, amongst other things, that we don’t have any of it outside of production. We therefore cannot just copy data from production to staging/dev.