Cloud migration strategies, be it lift & shift, rearchitect or rebuild, are fraught with inherent risks which need to be eliminated with the right QE approach
The adoption of cloud environments has been expanding for several years and is presently in an accelerated mode. A multi-cloud strategy is the defacto approach adopted by multiple organizations, as per Flexera 2022 State of the Cloud Report. The move toward cloud-native application architectures, exponential scaling needs of applications, and increased frequency and speed of product release launches have contributed to increased cloud adoption.
The success of migrating the application landscape to the cloud hinges on the ability to perform end-to-end quality assurance initiatives specific to the cloud.
Underestimation of application performance
Availability, scalability, reliability, and high response rates are critical expectations from an application in a cloud environment. Application performance issues can come to light on account of incorrect sizing of servers or network latency issues that might not have surfaced when the application is tested in isolation. It can also be an outcome of an incorrect understanding of probable workloads that can be managed by an application while in a cloud environment.
The right performance engineering strategy involves designing for performance in mind and fulfilling performance validations, including load testing. This ensures that the application under test remains stable in normal and peak conditions and defines and sets up application monitoring toolsets and parameters. There needs to be an understanding of workloads with the potential to be moved to the cloud and ones that need to remain on-premise. Incompatible application architectures need to be identified. Load testing should be carried out in parallel to record SLA response times across various loads for those moved to the cloud.
Security and compliance
With the increased adoption of data privacy norms like GDPR and CCPA, there is a renewed focus on ensuring the safety of data migrated from application to cloud. Incidents like the one with Marriott hotel, where half a million sensitive customer information like credit cards and identity were compromised, have brought the need to test the security of data loaded onto cloud environments.
A must-have element of a sound QA strategy is to ensure that both applications and data are secure and can withstand malicious attacks. With cybersecurity attacks increasing both in quantity and innovative tactics, there is a strong need for the implementation of security policies and testing techniques, including but not limited to vulnerability scanning, penetration testing, and threat and risk assessment. These are aimed at the following.
- Identifying security gaps and weaknesses in the system
- DDoS attack prevention
- Provide actionable insights on ways to eliminate potential vulnerabilities
Accuracy of Data migration
Assuring the quality of data that is being migrated to the cloud remains the top challenge, without which the convenience and performance expectation from cloud adoption falls flat. It calls for assessing quality before migrating, monitoring during migration, and verifying the integrity and quality post-migration. This is fraught with multiple challenges like migrating from old data models, duplicate record management, and resolving data ownership, to name a few.
White-box migration testing forms a key component of a robust data migration testing initiative. It starts off by logically verifying a migration script to guarantee it’s complete and accurate. This is followed by ensuring database compliance with required preconditions, e.g., detailed script description, source, and receiver structure, and data migration mapping. Furthermore, the QA team analyzes and assures the structure of the database, data storage formats, migration requirements, the formats of fields, etc. More recently, predictive data quality measures have also been adopted to get a centralized view and better control over data quality.
Application Interoperability
Not all apps that need to migrate to the cloud may be compatible with the cloud environment. Some applications show better performance in a private or hybrid cloud than in a public cloud. Some others require minor tweaking, while others may require extensive reengineering or recoding. Not identifying cross-application dependencies before planning the migration waves can lead to failure. Equally important is the need to integrate with third-party tools for seamless communication across applications without glitches.
A robust QA strategy needs to identify applications that are part of the network, their functionalities, and dependencies among applications, along with each app’s SLA since dependencies between systems and applications can make integration testing potentially challenging. Integration testing for cloud-based applications brings to the fore the need to consider the following:
- Resources for the validation of integration testing
- Assuring cloud migration by using third-party tools
- Discovering glitches in coordination within the cloud
- Application configuration in the cloud environment
- Seamless integration across multiple surround applications
Ensure successful cloud migration with Trigent’s QE services
Application migration to the cloud can be a painful process without a robust QE strategy. With aspects such as data quality, security, app performance, and seamless connection with a host of surrounding applications being paramount in a cloud environment, the need for testing has become more critical than ever.
Trigent’s cloud-first strategy enables organizations to leverage a customized, risk-mitigated cloud strategy and deployment model most suitable for the business. Our proven approach, frameworks, architectures, and partner ecosystem have helped businesses realize the potential of the cloud.
We provide a secure, seamless journey from in-house IT to a modern enterprise environment powered by Cloud. Our team of experts has enabled cloud transformation at scale and speed for small, medium, and large organizations across different industries. The transformation helps customers leverage the best architecture, application performance, infrastructure, and security without disrupting business continuity.
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