Testing: An Essential Element of Cloud Migration
November 4, 2011
2011 has seen the move to cloud computing gather speed, as companies start to commit budget to the technology that will change the landscape of IT. In an effort to capture the extent to which cloud has already penetrated the IT market, and at what rate we should expect it to grow, analysts have raced to release the most up-to-date market data…
The latest, from Gartner, revealed that an enormous 95% of organisations are planning to invest in software as a service (SaaS), while more than a third has already started the migration from on-premise services. Furthermore, Gartner has claimed that businesses will commit to spending between 40% and 80% of their IT budgets on the cloud in the next five years. These are exceptional statistics considering that 70% of the organizations using SaaS have only begun doing so in the last three years.
Why are companies now pursuing the cloud route? And what challenges will migrating to the cloud bring for CIOs?
The advantages of the cloud have been discussed at length and definitive "why switch to the cloud" lists are being published with such regularity there seems little reason to go into detail here. But, in summary, the most touted benefits of the cloud are that it reduces costs, has almost endless storage capabilities, enhances flexibility, and increases security. It also allows CIOs to shift their IT focus away from upgrades and maintenance.
Every major IT vendor has one or more cloud offerings on the market or in development, Oracle, for example, has Oracle Public Cloud; IBM, SmartCloud; Microsoft, Azure; and SAP, Business ByDesign. As an increasing number of applications, platforms and services move online, test tools will follow. Test tools are subject to the same economic forces as those moving other software online, and as the systems being tested move online, the technical barriers to online testing are coming down too.
HP, the current market leader for software test tools, markets two of its main tools, Quality Center and Performance Center, on both traditional and cloud platforms, yet the move to the cloud may challenge HP’s supremacy, as cheaper alternatives optimized for the cloud move onto the scene. One example might be the increasing number of cloud-based performance testing services that use standardized cheap or free web-based load test tools (HP’s load tools can test many other protocols than the web, but in the cloud, all applications use the web protocol, so this advantage falls away), and temporary cloud-based platforms for the infrastructure. Cloud-based challengers are also emerging in the test management tool arena, such as TestWave, and Zephyr.
Not only will test tools follow the general move to the cloud, but the move itself will have to be tested. Companies faced with managing the migration process of applications, data and software into the cloud will have to overcome a host of challenges to ensure they maintain functionality, data integrity, security and privacy. Many such migrations will require a great deal of testing, especially those that concern mission-critical systems.
In fact, we are likely to see the migration to the cloud being led by less mission-critical systems, and by cases where a new cloud system replaces an older system without the need for a migration. Systems with more interfaces (connections) to other systems and mission-critical systems will follow at a slower pace. Both types will need intensive testing to be migrated successfully.
CIOs considering a move to the cloud will of course be researching different systems in detail before making a commitment, and over time evolving their cloud strategy. Key drivers will be the cost savings to be made, the cost of the transition and the myriad potential risks. Testing will help to mitigate some of those risks, and an important consideration will be which test methods to apply during the migration process. Drilling down further, a test management tool is vital for a large-scale migration. While testing can be tracked by spreadsheets and email, for a project of major scale the use of a test management tool is near indispensable – the volume of tests and results is such that using spreadsheets and e-mail to keep track of them would result either in chaos or a considerable management overhead to keep them all in order.
Thorough testing will, in most cases be, an important part of cloud migration programs. If an organization treats testing as an afterthought and, as a consequence, implements a inadequately tested solution, it risks a defective system with limited integration, slow and cumbersome performance and network instability where the costs of support and maintenance increase rapidly. That said, testing is not free, and CIOs will attempt to balance the cost of testing each system in a migration program against the risk of not testing it. They will typically place their systems on a continuum of risk and business importance and decide which need in-depth testing, and which could be transferred safely with less testing.