Understand the relationship between the Integrations Inventory and the Environments Inventory - Integrations Inventory and Attributes

Understand the relationship between the Integrations Inventory and the Environments Inventory

(Chapter 35 of Integrations Inventory and Attributes)

Executive Summary: Chapter Overview

IF4IT

The Bottom Line

This chapter explains how Source Environment and Target Environment connect integrations to the enterprise environment model. These attributes expose production, non-production, disaster recovery, and external data movements, making cross-environment governance, production-data masking, and external boundary analysis possible at portfolio scale.

Core Concepts

Concept	Definition & Strategic Role
Source Environment	The operating environment in which the sending entity exists or executes.
Target Environment	The operating environment in which the receiving entity exists or executes.
Cross-Environment Flow	A data movement across environment boundaries that may require additional security, privacy, or testing controls.

Quick Q&A

Question: Why are Source and Target Environment attributes important?

Answer: They reveal whether data moves between Production, non-production, disaster recovery, or external environments. This visibility is critical for finding production data copied into test environments, external data sharing, and other flows that require stronger controls.

Every integration record carries a Source Environment and Target Environment attribute that identifies the IT operating environments in which the source and target entities reside. The Environments Inventory (not yet published — refer to the IF4IT Enterprise Inventory Management Best Practices document) will govern the formal taxonomy of IT operating environments to which these values are mapped.

The relationship is consumption: the Integrations Inventory consumes environment definitions to formally classify its source and target environments. Until the Environments Inventory is published, environment values are documented using the standard value set (Development, Systems Integration Testing, User Acceptance Testing, Production, Disaster Recovery, External). When published, Source Environment and Target Environment will carry formal Environment Semantic ID references.

When established, this relationship enables cross-environment governance at enterprise scale. The complete set of cross-environment integrations — including Production-to-non-Production and External-facing flows — is queryable from either inventory. The Environments Inventory can report on which environments are connected to which other environments through governed integration flows, and what data sensitivity classifications those flows carry.

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