How to Ensure Better Outcomes for Cloud Migration

As businesses try to consolidate their digital footprint, especially during the pandemic, investing in hiring cloud platforms has become a critical requirement for success. It allows businesses to become more agile, flexible, scalable, integrated, efficient, productive, responsive, and successful. However, notwithstanding the raft of benefits, migrating to the cloud can be a challenge. In order to set up an optimized IT infrastructure customized to the needs of the business, organizations can find it difficult to choose between public or private cloud computing environments and traditional IT environments.

According to Statista, approximately 33% of surveyed organizations run 50% of their workloads in the cloud. Also, the global forecast for businesses’ spending on public cloud is expected to grow by 23.1 percent ($332.3 billion) in 2021, as opposed to $270 billion in 2020 (Source: Gartner). Businesses worrying about making the transition to a cloud-based environment need not go the whole hog. Instead, they can utilize a hybrid cloud model wherein both on-premise and cloud environments can be used to run assets.

Deploying stringent quality assurance for a successful cloud migration

Migrating to a cloud environment has become a critical requirement with organizations embracing the remote and distributed work from home model. The top benefits of moving to the cloud are:

l Greater agility in accessing on-demand IT assets, especially during unexpected traffic surges.

l Reduced expenses by opting for a pay-as-you-need approach.

l Availability of enhanced security for the entire stack.

Steps to formulate infrastructure and cloud migration assurance for better outcomes

Before conceptualizing and executing cloud migration assurance, it is important for business enterprises to make a smooth transition to the cloud. Remember, the success of any cloud migration depends on two factors: a well-defined migration strategy comprising various approaches and phases and ensuring the quality of the migration through cloud application testing.

Designing a cloud migration strategy

Before formulating the infrastructure for cloud migration assurance, it is important to design a robust cloud migration strategy. It usually begins with assessing the IT stack with respect to several factors:

l The goals of cloud migration and how they align with business objectives

l Risks in terms of integrations and data security while moving to the cloud

l Deployment cloud models to be adopted - private, hybrid, public, and multi-cloud

l Type of cloud services to be adopted - SaaS, PaaS, and IaaS

l Type of approach chosen - one-shot or phased migration

Once the cloud migration plan is finalized, the other critical factor of the cloud migration readiness assessment should be dealt with. Also, notwithstanding the cloud migration approach taken by enterprises, aspects such as security, scalability, customer experience, and application performance need to be ensured. Let us understand how continuous assurance can be applied to cloud migration solutions and add value.

Test automation across the cloud: Test automation ensures automated integration and security testing of applications at every phase or stage of the delivery cycle in the cloud. It is beyond any functional test automation, namely, sanity, regression, or smoke testing.

Keeping business context: Business context is given high priority once the IT stack is migrated and deployed to the cloud. The entire migration is monitored and validated continuously through automated test executions. And while doing so, key metrics such as baseline values in the on-premise environment are compared with the observed values in the cloud environment.

Security testing: Given the rising incidences of cybercrime, security considerations have become the primary concern for any organization. It is only with continuous cloud migration risk assessment that secure software applications are deployed to the cloud. To ensure that sensitive resources are not compromised during and post cloud migration, they are subjected to a series of tests. These include penetration testing, vulnerability assessments, and regulatory and compliance testing.

Customer experience testing: In the digital ecosystem comprising the cloud, among others, everything revolves around delivering a better customer experience. Organizations leverage cloud testing services to conduct a host of tests, such as usability testing, cross-browser and device testing, and mobile testing.

Scalability and performance testing: One of the biggest benefits of adopting the cloud environment is achieving high performance and scalability, especially during times of traffic surge. The newly migrated software applications or IT resources are subjected to performance testing such as endurance, stress, and load, among others, to verify if they are flexible and scalable without any performance errors.

Conclusion

The key to delivering a superior customer experience includes crafting a cloud migration strategy and executing rigorous testing for the cloud application migration solution. Cloud migration enables business enterprises to leverage the latest disruptive technologies (data analytics, machine learning, and artificial intelligence, among others). Successful cloud adoption can position organizations to run a cloud-first strategy and facilitate the DX journey.

Michael works for Cigniti Technologies, which is the world's first Independent Software Testing Company to be appraised at CMMI-SVC Level 5, and an ISO 9001:2008 & ISO 27001:2013 certified organization.