CISSP - Security Operations (13% of the exam) - Section 7.9

Understand and participate in change management processes.

Describe the change management process including change requests, impact assessment, approval process, implementation, and rollback planning. Recognise how bypassing change control increases the risk of unintended security regressions in production environments.

change managementchange controlapproval processrollback

Practice question for this objective

Free sampleSecurity Operationseasy

During a scheduled change window, a database administrator applies an approved schema update to a production system. Twenty minutes after the change, the application team reports that a critical reporting feature is failing for end users and customer-facing dashboards are showing errors. The change ticket includes a tested rollback procedure. What is the BEST next action for the change owner?

AKeep the schema change in place and instruct the application team to develop a hotfix in their code so customer dashboards work again as soon as possible.
BPause and convene a full root-cause analysis meeting with all stakeholders before deciding whether the production change should be reversed or left running.
CExecute the approved rollback procedure to restore the previous known-good state, notify stakeholders, and schedule a post-implementation review of the failed change. Correct
DMark the change as successful in the change record because it deployed without technical errors and open a separate incident ticket for the reporting issue.

Recognise that invoking the pre-approved rollback to restore a known-good state is the correct response when a change causes production impact. A rollback plan is a mandatory element of any change record because production changes can fail in ways that testing did not surface. When user impact is observed within the change window, the change owner restores service by executing the rollback first and then drives investigation and re-planning through the post-implementation review.

Why A is wrong: Layering an emergency code fix on top of a failing change feels productive but extends customer impact, introduces an unreviewed change on top of another change, and bypasses the rollback that was already approved as part of the original request.

Why B is wrong: Root-cause analysis is essential after the incident is contained, but holding a meeting while customers are visibly impacted prolongs the outage; the rollback exists precisely so the service can be restored first and analysed afterwards.

Why C is correct: When an approved change causes a production impact, invoking the pre-approved rollback to return the system to a known-good state is the correct response; it restores service quickly and feeds the failure into a structured post-implementation review.

Why D is wrong: A change that breaks the business outcome it was meant to support has not succeeded, and recording it as such hides the real result; the linked incident must drive a rollback decision, not a paperwork tidy-up.

See more CISSP practice questions, answers explained.

Exam traps in Security Operations

Answers that look right on this material and are not. Each one is a distractor from a different question in the CISSP bank for this domain.

Deploy the rule change immediately in production and document it in the change log afterwards so the portal launch is not delayed.
Why it is wrong: Skipping authorisation and going straight to production is tempting when a change feels trivial, but bypassing the formal request and approval step removes the risk review, peer scrutiny, and audit trail that change management exists to provide.
Confirmation from the backup vendor that the restored data set matches the last successful nightly backup checksum.
Why it is wrong: A matching checksum only proves the restore is faithful to the backup; it does not prove the underlying environment is free of the threat actor or that the initial access vector has been closed. Recovery on a still-vulnerable platform commonly leads to reinfection.

Examworthy is not affiliated with or endorsed by ISC2. Original, blueprint-aligned practice material only.