Keeping testing and production server environments clean, in sync, and consistent

Question

It seems that the company that I work for is always struggling with our customers’ server environments.

Specifically, we almost always encounter pro

Answer 1

Of course we have a general idea of why this happens. Every cloned environment starts out the same and works the same the first couple of days, but sooner or later someone reconfigure something in only one of the server environments

I think you're being generous, or you've been very lucky. As often as not shops that need to contract out for development work don't really understand the development process. If they provide you with a test environment at all what you'll get is a their production system from before the last server refresh.