subject: Cloud Testing Increasing Scalability, Flexibility And Agility For Testing Enterprises [print this page] Today cloud computing and cloud testing are in their prime. But this was not the case few years back; the general approach adopted by various enterprises to test a software application was to invite big investments in imitating the user actions from various sections across the globe. With the growing need for firewalls and load balancers for load and performance testing, which involve high capital investment on hardware, software, overall maintenance, small and medium sized firms have to think a lot before investing so much of capital in their projects. With these problems comes the concept of cloud, which offers an accessible solution for such companies by providing off-premise architecture, which can be easily accessed via any system/machine.
These days the main focus of IT companies is to find ways by which they can increase their capacity or add capabilities to their resources without investing much in new infrastructure. The answer is Cloud computing. It is a movement that looks set to take the quality on a different level as more and more software testing professionals begin to realize how testing on cloud could do good to them in terms of reduction in cost, and managing resources and results.
Cloud testing in concise:-
It is basically the use of hardware and programs owned by someone else, that you can buy as you require (on demand). Cloud computing providers empower testers with full access and availability to vast quantities of computing power, which is very crucial in software testing services. The most staggering benefit of cloud computing is that software testing services doesnt need to invest in licensing of high end expensive tools for any of the programs or kits that they use. With cloud computing the responsibilities of buying expensive tools for testing and other never ending tasks like keeping the softwares up to date lies with the company that offers you their services. Few big names have also stepped into this domain, and this number is increasing exponentially with the popularity of cloud computing. Various small and medium-sized testing firms which use cloud computing stand to become much more flexible, yielding better results. The reason being, your cloud vendor has access to all the latest tools and gadgets, including ones you could never have afforded. Moreover, it does not make any sense to buy a $1000 testing tool if you need that just for a short period of time or only for a particular project.
So now the question that might hit testing firms is, why do they need cloud computing in their testing? The answer to this is - it makes more sense in terms of revenue and worldwide marketing. Testing on cloud provides scalability and agility in your testing efforts. It makes more sense to test software globally on a large scale to meet the requirements of the end-users who are going to use the software on different parts of the globe.
Cloud testing thus offers concrete business benefits but along with these latent benefits come a new set of concerns; security, availability, privacy, and performance. In todays world when everything is outsourced to the third party testing firms, challenges revolve around: how can we maintain privacy of data? How can we reduce downtime? And by doing so how can we maintain the performance and credibility of our testing? Thus measuring the performance and security of a cloud vendor is very important before you chosen one.
