MAINTAINING CONTROL OVER RESTRICTED DATA DURING DEPLOYMENT TO CLOUD COMPUTING ENVIRONMENTS

The invention relates to maintaining control over restricted data during deployment to cloud computing environments. Releases to the production environment of a cloud computing environment are deployed in a manner that maintains control over restricted data and the data plane of the cloud computing environment. A DevOps personnel is tasked with developing the release. However, the DevOps personnel is not authorized to deploy the release to the cloud computing environment because the DevOps personnel does not have access to restricted data in the cloud computing environment or the ability to modify the cloud computing environment to gain access to restricted data. Operating personnel who has access to restricted data and the right to modify the cloud computing environment is notified of the release and given release specifications providing details of the release. If the operator approves the release, therelease is transferred to the cloud computing environment. A deployment engine then automatically deploys t