#cloudapplicationtesting

Cloud-based technology has made business enterprises realize how they can achieve the fruits of digital transformation and grow. From online classes and financial transactions to remote working, the cloud has truly brought about a revolution of sorts. According to Gartner, global cloud spending will likely exceed $482 billion in 2022, a significant increase from $313 billion in 2020. The growth has been fueled by technologies such as edge computing, Desktop as a Service (DaaS), and containerization.

As businesses limp back to normalcy in the pre-pandemic days, the cloud is going to be the principal technology to help them accelerate the transformation of their workflows. It is going to empower organizations to offer intelligent digital solutions that are agile, dependable, accessible, and adaptable. And with 5G on the anvil, the adoption of cloud is expected to reach unprecedented levels. For instance, by 2025, the world is likely to generate 3.5 times the amount of data that was generated in 2020 (44 zetabytes).

Growth in cloud adoption and challenges

Notwithstanding the recent advances in cloud adoption, a large number of enterprises are still relying on on-premise systems and are embracing hybrid solutions. The ubiquity of the cloud is such that enterprises are migrating to the cloud in droves to garner benefits such as unmatched accessibility, enhanced security, cost-efficiency, high scalability, elasticity, and possibilities for automation. But despite business enterprises racing to implement cloud solutions for their processes and workflows, there are a host of challenges as well.

These may include the cloud-based system dealing with data loss, downtime, security and compliance issues, technical feasibility assessment, and inadequate control and visibility. To mitigate such challenges, independent cloud testing services can validate every activity taking place in the value chain. The validation activity may include areas such as data, applications, and the overall IT infrastructure of the enterprise.

With enterprises going for digital transformation by leveraging the cloud, they expect greater control over their data and IT infrastructure. They seek all the benefits of cloud migration, such as infrastructure management, automation, scalability on demand, and flexibility. However, finding a single cloud-based solution that ticks all the boxes is not easy. So, instead of putting all their eggs in a single basket, enterprises can simultaneously embrace on-premises solutions while going through transformation.

In fact, they should embrace a hybrid cloud environment where they will have the choice to either transform in place or across any cloud combination. The success of any cloud-based digital transformation should be underpinned by cloud assurance. It can help enterprises and all stakeholders enjoy a harmonised experience across the cloud.

How can cloud assurance facilitate digital transformation?

Since cloud migration solutions can be fraught with risks, any cloud migration readiness assessment exercise should have the following pointers. These can help them meet the challenges and requirements of various stakeholders during and after cloud migration.

Cloud application testing ensures the data center, applications, and infrastructure are free of issues or vulnerabilities. Also, it vets their compliance with established industry and regulatory protocols.

Cloud migration testing helps businesses uphold quality specifications during cloud migration. Also, in cases of modernizing projects and data center transformation, QA testing can assist in improving the scope, visibility, and compliance of testing the components, applications, and infrastructure.

A cloud migration testing approach can help enterprises predict costs, accelerate time to market, and foster efficiency in a cloud migration automation exercise.

Cloud assurance finds out whether the system has achieved a compliant state from a corporate and regulatory standpoint. Further, testing keeps the cloud-based system compliant as and when changes are introduced. In doing this, the QA team analyzes the changes, especially related to risk derivation, requirement creation, test creation, and execution in a real test environment.

Cloud-based QA environments can help enterprises provision or de-provision virtual machines on demand. This can reduce the provisioning time significantly and allow enterprises to focus on core areas.

The maintenance of any cloud-based systems is of prime importance and may include tasks to be performed during cloud assurance. These are impact assessments, vendor release management, execution of tests for core releases, reporting and analysis, and updation of validated documents, among others.

Conclusion 

Digital transformation is the new paradigm that business enterprises across domains are willing to embrace, especially given their bitter-sweet experiences in the last two years of the pandemic. And the cloud is the most important technology to enable this transformation, provided the quality of each component therein is assured. So, any testing of the cloud migration platform should encompass every phase of migration right from the start.

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James Daniel is a software Tech enthusiastic & works at Cigniti Technologies. I'm having a great understanding of today's software testing quality that yields strong results and always happy to create valuable content & share thoughts.

Migrating to the cloud has become a business imperative to achieve a host of objectives. These include accelerating innovation, securing databases, delivering services quickly and cost-effectively, gaining insights into real-time scenarios, enabling quick decision making, and responding quickly to customer queries and market scenarios, among others. Most organizations have committed themselves to integrating the cloud into their value chain. As per the cloud computing survey conducted by IDG, about 92 percent of the respondents said that they have at least one application operating in the cloud, 59 percent are planning to migrate most or all of their IT infrastructure to the cloud, and cloud computing is likely to account for 32 percent of all IT budgets.

For enterprises aiming to achieve digital transformation given the backdrop of the pandemic and rising competition, it is important to leverage the benefits of the cloud. However, migrating to the cloud can have its share of risks and challenges. These may involve modernizing and migrating thousands of legacy applications, controlling costs, securing data, achieving an optimal speed of operations, keeping operations up and running during the migration process, and executing cloud migration assurance, among others.

Without doing proper due diligence for cloud migration, enterprises can face high-risk situations such as system downtime, data breaches, server failure, or database errors. This is where a robust cloud migration testing strategy needs to be put in place to bring about a secure, cost-effective, and agile migration. And to manage the workload and ensure the core job of moving data is done properly, QA teams ought to follow cloud migration automation. Before going into the nitty-gritty of enforcing test automation, let us first understand cloud migration testing and its critical role in achieving digital transformation.

What is cloud migration assurance? 

Cloud migration involves the transfer of massive amounts of data from on-premise systems to the cloud server. This calls for ensuring the data fields are properly populated or the receiving system is plugged in correctly. This is crucial, for any small mistake can cause a breakdown in the entire value chain. This is why cloud application testing is so important, as it ensures everything has moved to the right place and works as desired. The key metrics used to determine the success of cloud migration testing include application start and response times, the usability of the application on various platforms (mobile devices, desktops, and remote connections), its performance during off-hours, and peak demand.

How can test automation secure cloud migration solutions at speed

Since cloud migration is a high-risk, cost-intensive, and resource crunching process, test automation can help achieve the following outcomes:

The migration process is thoroughly checked to ensure every piece of data and information has been moved to the right destination. This keeps the business-critical processes running uninterrupted.

As the migrated database is updated in real-time, the loss or breach of data can be prevented, thereby upholding the company’s reputation.

Ensures the successful migration of content and data to the correct destination. Any errors identified are fixed quickly, thereby minimizing or eliminating any risk to productivity.

Reduces the number of testers to be deployed as the test automation tool can take over the manual work to deliver quick and consistent results.

Delivers a positive return on investment as the test automation process is able to drive a clean and accurate migration solution.

Tests can be executed in parallel for various devices, browsers, operating systems, and networks.

Continuous delivery can be achieved by running automated tests after deployment and code changes.

How to automate cloud testing services

Automation as a cloud migration testing approach shall constitute of two areas:

Test automation for individual cloud computers (instances): Here, automated tests are created to run on remote computers without any human intervention. The tests should be able to manage various situations, such as handling unexpected messages in the message boxes appropriately, among others. The tools used here should support event tracking and allow control of unexpected situations.

Automation of operations in the cloud: It implies automating the actions to be performed on the instances. These include launch, start, stop, login, upload data, and download data from the instances, among others. The testers should specify the number of instances where the automated test process starts and runs on each instance.

Conclusion

Automating the cloud migration testing approach can obtain a plethora of benefits for the enterprise aiming to migrate its resources to the cloud. These include integrating with the CI/CD pipeline, enabling short feedback loops, enhancing security on public and/or private cloud networks, and enabling test management and reporting.

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James Daniel is a software Tech enthusiastic & works at Cigniti Technologies. I'm having a great understanding of today's software testing quality that yields strong results and always happy to create valuable content & share thoughts.

As businesses try to consolidate their digital footprint, especially during the pandemic, investing in hiring cloud platforms has become a critical requirement for success. It allows businesses to become more agile, flexible, scalable, integrated, efficient, productive, responsive, and successful. However, notwithstanding the raft of benefits, migrating to the cloud can be a challenge. In order to set up an optimized IT infrastructure customized to the needs of the business, organizations can find it difficult to choose between public or private cloud computing environments and traditional IT environments.

According to Statista, approximately 33% of surveyed organizations run 50% of their workloads in the cloud. Also, the global forecast for businesses’ spending on public cloud is expected to grow by 23.1 percent ($332.3 billion) in 2021, as opposed to $270 billion in 2020 (Source: Gartner). Businesses worrying about making the transition to a cloud-based environment need not go the whole hog. Instead, they can utilize a hybrid cloud model wherein both on-premise and cloud environments can be used to run assets.

Deploying stringent quality assurance for a successful cloud migration

Migrating to a cloud environment has become a critical requirement with organizations embracing the remote and distributed work from home model. The top benefits of moving to the cloud are:

Greater agility in accessing on-demand IT assets, especially during unexpected traffic surges.

Reduced expenses by opting for a pay-as-you-need approach.

Availability of enhanced security for the entire stack.

Steps to formulate infrastructure and cloud migration assurance for better outcomes

Before conceptualizing and executing cloud migration assurance, it is important for business enterprises to make a smooth transition to the cloud. Remember, the success of any cloud migration depends on two factors: a well-defined migration strategy comprising various approaches and phases and ensuring the quality of the migration through cloud application testing.  

Designing a cloud migration strategy

Before formulating the infrastructure for cloud migration assurance, it is important to design a robust cloud migration strategy. It usually begins with assessing the IT stack with respect to several factors:

The goals of cloud migration and how they align with business objectives

Risks in terms of integrations and data security while moving to the cloud

Deployment cloud models to be adopted - private, hybrid, public, and multi-cloud

Type of cloud services to be adopted - SaaS, PaaS, and IaaS

Type of approach chosen - one-shot or phased migration

Once the cloud migration plan is finalized, the other critical factor of the cloud migration readiness assessment should be dealt with. Also, notwithstanding the cloud migration approach taken by enterprises, aspects such as security, scalability, customer experience, and application performance need to be ensured. Let us understand how continuous assurance can be applied to cloud migration solutions and add value.

Test automation across the cloud: Test automation ensures automated integration and security testing of applications at every phase or stage of the delivery cycle in the cloud. It is beyond any functional test automation, namely, sanity, regression, or smoke testing.

Keeping business context: Business context is given high priority once the IT stack is migrated and deployed to the cloud. The entire migration is monitored and validated continuously through automated test executions. And while doing so, key metrics such as baseline values in the on-premise environment are compared with the observed values in the cloud environment.

Security testing: Given the rising incidences of cybercrime, security considerations have become the primary concern for any organization. It is only with continuous cloud migration risk assessment that secure software applications are deployed to the cloud. To ensure that sensitive resources are not compromised during and post cloud migration, they are subjected to a series of tests. These include penetration testing, vulnerability assessments, and regulatory and compliance testing.

Customer experience testing: In the digital ecosystem comprising the cloud, among others, everything revolves around delivering a better customer experience. Organizations leverage cloud testing services to conduct a host of tests, such as usability testing, cross-browser and device testing, and mobile testing.

Scalability and performance testing: One of the biggest benefits of adopting the cloud environment is achieving high performance and scalability, especially during times of traffic surge. The newly migrated software applications or IT resources are subjected to performance testing such as endurance, stress, and load, among others, to verify if they are flexible and scalable without any performance errors.

Conclusion

The key to delivering a superior customer experience includes crafting a cloud migration strategy and executing rigorous testing for the cloud application migration solution. Cloud migration enables business enterprises to leverage the latest disruptive technologies (data analytics, machine learning, and artificial intelligence, among others). Successful cloud adoption can position organizations to run a cloud-first strategy and facilitate the DX journey.

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James Daniel is a software Tech enthusiastic & works at Cigniti Technologies. I'm having a great understanding of today's software testing quality that yields strong results and always happy to create valuable content & share thoughts.

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