subject: Cigniti Test The Cloud [print this page] "Confusion remains the norm"Confusion remains the norm. Many misconceptions exist around potential benefits, pitfalls and, of course, cost savings. Cloud is often part of cost-cutting discussions, even though its ability to cut costs is not a given. There are also many reasons to talk about the capabilities enabled by cloud computing: agility, speed and innovation"Gartner
Testing has conventionally required expensive infrastructure and resources that were only used intermittently. With increasing complexity of business applications it has become harder to build and preserve in-house testing facilities that replicate real-time test environments. However with the arrival of cloud, costs have lowered, flexibility and collaboration have increased as opposed to maintaining an in-house test environment. But with so many options, CIOs need to justify their decision not only with their investment in cloud but also to adopt the right cloud as they explore various challenges associated with it.
Need for Testing the cloud:
Enterprises and ISVs are now seeking to cloud-enable their applications for the obvious benefits that cloud provides. However while migrating their existing applications in order to cloud-enable them, developers face a challenging situation. While migrating to the Cloud developers need to check architecture compatibility, clustering capabilities for load balancing, support proper failover for high availability, multi-tenancy, tenant provisioning alongside classical provisioning and metering. With so many cloud platforms like Amazon EC2, Google AppEngine, Rackspace, Savvis, Terremark, the need for testing for cloud and testing the cloud has become imperative.
Business and Operational Challenges
Security: Mostly because data of one enterprise may be stored in a location beyond an enterprises legal and regulatory controls. Customer Privacy is also another major concern.
Switching vendors in cloud is a difficult proposition: Lack of universal standards among different cloud providing platforms makes it difficult for an organization to switch vendors if the need arises. Cloud interoperability and vendor lock in issues are two major concerns while migrating into a cloud.
Choosing the right cloud matters: Pricing is dependent on the cloud usage and the wrong choice can spin costs out of control.
- Cost of bringing services back in-house due to regulatory change
- Cost of implementing and operating countermeasures to mitigate risk
- Unexpected expenses involved in initial migration of systems
- Loss of internal IT knowledge providing competitive differentiation
- Lock-in with specific cloud provider or proprietary service model, which may slow down future adoption of open standards-based services
Data Integrity during migration to the cloud, with multiple databases during the transition phase.
High performance A moving target
Cloud disaster recovery
Migrating to Public Clouds: Move, Build, or Replace with SaaS
