The key business drivers behind moving workloads to cloud vary from one organization to another. It might be an intention to improve scalability and performance, or simply to reduce organization’s upfront investment by assigning IT infrastructure responsibilities to one of the trusted service providers like Microsoft Azure, Amazon (AWS), IBM, Google or Oracle. The reasons could be many, some of them are outlined in this article.
Once you have decided to move your products or services to the cloud, testing is a crucial step in the cloud migration journey. It avoids cloud scalability issues, server breakdown issues such as application or website crash or database errors and more, which can be extremely risky in terms of brand’s reputation, time and resources.
With that in mind, business owners or IT decision makers should properly plan and perform their cloud migration journey while putting Testing in top priority during cloud migration irrespective of environment.
Addressing Key Challenges That Arise While Validating Applications
Cloud migration throws certain challenges in validating applications. Some of the instances and how to validate them at various aspects are discussed here.
Functional Validation
Functional validation or cloud-ready validation assesses production readiness of migrated applications. It is fundamental to verify if various aspects of the migrated applications are performing as per SLAs. For an effective cloud migration, validate SaaS/Cloud services functions and perform end-to-end application’s function validation. Check the following test cases to perform functional validation of an application for cloud testing:
Integration Testing (With Third-Party Applications)
Cloud migration is not just moving data, but it is managing a range of variables – security, authentication, integration, compatibility, testing and monitoring over time. Among the above variables, integration with third-party tools plays a significant role. Because, today, there are many technology choices with cloud integration than ever before.
But, the dependencies between systems and applications can complicate integration testing. If you are integrating a lot of services together that come with varying SLAs, testing in the cloud with a plethora of third-party tools, services and applications represents a major challenge. To avoid such issues, ensure you go through the below checklist and validate them effectively:
If you don’t have in-house expertise, make sure to outsource validation for integration to your cloud provider or a managed service provider who fills the gap.
Security Testing
One of the main deterrents to migrating to the cloud is Security. Applications can be very secure in the cloud, but unlike conventional storage you will not have any hardware. This means, you don’t have complete control over the data. To keep the data secure in the cloud requires a whole new level of security procedures and strategies. If you are planning for an Infrastructure as a Service (IaaS) architecture, ensure you check whether your workloads can be migrated to the cloud; or will there be any significant difficulties after migration. Following checklist can be handy to crosscheck some cases:
Various aspects of application Security Testing include: Data security and data privacy testing, application transaction security, business process security and user privacy security testing.
Performance Testing
Assessing performance and response time requirements of applications and workloads while migrating to the cloud is a significant factor determining cloud migration success. There are areas that affect moving an application to a cloud service, some of them include: response time implications and scalability factors. Check out the below steps to ensure workload performance and SLAs are met:
Disaster Recovery Plan and Business Continuity Plan
Be prepared for the worst-case scenarios in the cloud, from simple data recovery and disaster recovery practice to a plan addressing unique incidents of attack. Validate all your disaster recovery plans in the event of cloud outages.
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