Just recently, I had a developer accidentally try to restore a database to production, when he should have been restoring to a staging copy. It's easy to do, given that the db names are similar, i.e., CustomerName_Staging versus CustomerName_Production.
Ideally, I'd have these on entirely separate boxes, but that is cost prohibitive, and, strictly speaking, it doesn't prevent the same thing from happening if the user connects to the wrong box.
This is not a security problem, per se – it was the correct user working with the staging database, and if there is work to be done on the production database, it would be him as well. I'd love to have a deployment officer to separate out those concerns, but the team isn't big enough for that.
I'd love to hear some advice in terms of practice, configuration and controls on how to prevent this.
Best Answer
If this is something you see yourself doing often, automate it. And since you're both developers, writing some code should be in your wheelhouse. :) Seriously though... by automating it, you can do things like:
Et cetera. You're only limited by your imagination.