The post-pandemic era is rapidly changing traditional business processes and forces companies to combat challenges by adopting novel technologies. The cloud is one of them. By moving digital resources from on-premises infrastructure to the cloud, organizations optimize costs, gain high workload flexibility, ease management, and obtain tempting recovery capabilities.
In this way, Statista forecasts that the global cloud app market size will skyrocket and reach almost $170 billion in 2025. While in just China alone, the popularity of cloud migration services is booming, making the market volume exceed $1 billion by 2023.
However, failures do happen, and companies have to roll the applications back, wasting precious resources. One of the ways businesses can prevent this frustration is to put quality assurance into action. In the article, I’ll focus on the six most important aspects to fulfill to improve the odds of success.
Quality assurance: an important piece of a migration puzzle
The migration process isn’t a walk in the park. Just have a look at multiple questions that arise throughout this path:
· Cost issues (that include immediate migration expenses and those in the long haul associated with training)
· The lack of high-skilled specialists able to support the process every step of the way
· Well-known resistance to adopt novel notions.
What’s more, other high-priority technical challenges involve the inherent complexities of cloud architectures, security concerns, possible performance bottlenecks that may negatively affect overall results.
Software testing can ease processes for involved teams, reduce transformation time, decrease operational costs, and increase IT solution scalability, stability, and soundness.
Ensuring a smooth migration with 6 QA aspects
Whatever model businesses choose to implement — SaaS, PaaS, IaaS — flying infrastructure to the cloud is fraught with moving enormous data amounts from one system to another. To eliminate the tiniest possibilities of major breakdowns down the line, companies may focus on the following significant quality assurance aspects.
1. Migration
To enable that not a single record is lost on the way, the QA engineers perform white-box migration testing. It implies a logical verification of a migration script to guarantee it’s complete and correct.
After ensuring that the database complies with required preconditions, like a detailed script description, structure of the source and the receiver, and data migration mapping, the team moves to testing.
The specialists verify that all the registries are migrated, the data is complete and appears at the right place, all the obligatory fields are filled, and the processing of source and receiver fields is proper.
Apart from that, the QA team analyzes the SQL code to check the structure of the database, data storage formats, migration requirements, the formats of fields, and some other aspects.
2. Cybersecurity
This is another important factor to focus on. It’s vital to ensure that the application and the data are safe as well as would be able to withstand the attacks of malicious intruders (who each year apply more sophisticated techniques resulting in lost revenues and tarnished reputation).
Just remember the recent case with the Marriott Hotel when half a million customer records, including sensitive credit card and identity data, got compromised.
To provide a risk-free environment, companies should introduce advanced cybersecurity measures to mitigate any threats. One of them includes penetration testing and vulnerability scanning which help to:
· Identify weaknesses in the system
· Prevent so common DDoS attacks
· Enable data security at rest, in use, and during transit
· Provide actionable insights into the ways to eliminate spotted vulnerabilities.
3. Integration
Currently, the popularity of microservice architecture is growing by leaps and bounds due to higher scalability, better fault isolation, and greater agility. Such systems are designed so that each component is responsible for a single activity, while establishing connections between them through APIs. And even in IT products based on other architectural types, APIs enable integration with third-party tools and services.
To ensure cloud migration success, organizations may perform integration verifications to confirm that all the APIs and libraries are working properly, all components harmoniously blend in with one another, and there are no coordination issues within the transferred software.
4. Performance
High throughput, scalability, and reliability are those critical cloud benefits reached by validating how the system performs under increased loads. So, the QA engineers define monitoring requirements, set up tools, and fulfill performance verifications, including load testing, to ensure that app operation doesn’t decrease under normal and peak conditions.
5. Functional
Functional validation assesses the production readiness for IT solutions moved to the cloud and helps guarantee that they function in full compliance with defined requirements. This is when the QA engineers check that the specific input generates desirable outcomes, object references and page layout operate as they are supposed to, and more.
6. Speed
According to World Quality Report 2021–22, 50% of all the respondents (1,750 IT business representatives) stated that their test automation efforts are paying off, while another 68% mentioned increased transparency of QA activities.
The benefits of automated-enabled cloud migration are clear — from reduced time and decreased costs to a confident transfer of complex workloads with no data loss and little business disruption. Automated test scripts allow software testing engineers to define process bottlenecks faster and with higher accuracy, accelerating time to production.
Bonus: be ready for whatever comes
Forewarned is forearmed. As cloud migration is rife with obstacles, it is a good practice for companies to occasionally focus on testing and updating disaster recovery plans to ensure business continuity and enable smooth and rapid data recovery.
Conclusion
According to Deloitte, by this year, 90% of global enterprises will opt for cloud solutions, which is understandable due to providing multiple benefits like decreased costs, high scalability, or simplified management.
Once the company has decided to move IT solutions to the cloud, quality assurance should become a crucial step in the upcoming journey. The disregard for software testing during cloud migration may lead to unexpected disastrous failures related to data loss.
Throughout the entire process, testing focused on migration, cybersecurity, integration, performance, and functional aspects accelerated by test automation help smooth the transition, define issues early, and avoid extra financial or time resources.
https://medium.datadriveninvestor.com/preventing-cloud-migration-failures-with-qa-6-steps-to-make-960f8460222f