How Can Cloud Assurance Help You Achieve Digital Transformation

Cloud-based technology has made business enterprises realize how they can achieve the fruits of digital transformation and grow. From online classes and financial transactions to remote working, the cloud has truly brought about a revolution of sorts. According to Gartner, global cloud spending will likely exceed $482 billion in 2022, a significant increase from $313 billion in 2020. The growth has been fueled by technologies such as edge computing, Desktop as a Service (DaaS), and containerization.

As businesses limp back to normalcy in the pre-pandemic days, the cloud is going to be the principal technology to help them accelerate the transformation of their workflows. It is going to empower organizations to offer intelligent digital solutions that are agile, dependable, accessible, and adaptable. And with 5G on the anvil, the adoption of cloud is expected to reach unprecedented levels. For instance, by 2025, the world is likely to generate 3.5 times the amount of data that was generated in 2020 (44 zetabytes).

Growth in cloud adoption and challenges

Notwithstanding the recent advances in cloud adoption, a large number of enterprises are still relying on on-premise systems and are embracing hybrid solutions. The ubiquity of the cloud is such that enterprises are migrating to the cloud in droves to garner benefits such as unmatched accessibility, enhanced security, cost-efficiency, high scalability, elasticity, and possibilities for automation. But despite business enterprises racing to implement cloud solutions for their processes and workflows, there are a host of challenges as well.

These may include the cloud-based system dealing with data loss, downtime, security and compliance issues, technical feasibility assessment, and inadequate control and visibility. To mitigate such challenges, independent cloud testing services can validate every activity taking place in the value chain. The validation activity may include areas such as data, applications, and the overall IT infrastructure of the enterprise.

With enterprises going for digital transformation by leveraging the cloud, they expect greater control over their data and IT infrastructure. They seek all the benefits of cloud migration, such as infrastructure management, automation, scalability on demand, and flexibility. However, finding a single cloud-based solution that ticks all the boxes is not easy. So, instead of putting all their eggs in a single basket, enterprises can simultaneously embrace on-premises solutions while going through transformation.

In fact, they should embrace a hybrid cloud environment where they will have the choice to either transform in place or across any cloud combination. The success of any cloud-based digital transformation should be underpinned by cloud assurance. It can help enterprises and all stakeholders enjoy a harmonised experience across the cloud.

How can cloud assurance facilitate digital transformation?

Since cloud migration solutions can be fraught with risks, any cloud migration readiness assessment exercise should have the following pointers. These can help them meet the challenges and requirements of various stakeholders during and after cloud migration.

Cloud application testing ensures the data center, applications, and infrastructure are free of issues or vulnerabilities. Also, it vets their compliance with established industry and regulatory protocols.

Cloud migration testing helps businesses uphold quality specifications during cloud migration. Also, in cases of modernizing projects and data center transformation, QA testing can assist in improving the scope, visibility, and compliance of testing the components, applications, and infrastructure.

A cloud migration testing approach can help enterprises predict costs, accelerate time to market, and foster efficiency in a cloud migration automation exercise.

Cloud assurance finds out whether the system has achieved a compliant state from a corporate and regulatory standpoint. Further, testing keeps the cloud-based system compliant as and when changes are introduced. In doing this, the QA team analyzes the changes, especially related to risk derivation, requirement creation, test creation, and execution in a real test environment.

Cloud-based QA environments can help enterprises provision or de-provision virtual machines on demand. This can reduce the provisioning time significantly and allow enterprises to focus on core areas.

The maintenance of any cloud-based systems is of prime importance and may include tasks to be performed during cloud assurance. These are impact assessments, vendor release management, execution of tests for core releases, reporting and analysis, and updation of validated documents, among others.

Conclusion

Digital transformation is the new paradigm that business enterprises across domains are willing to embrace, especially given their bitter-sweet experiences in the last two years of the pandemic. And the cloud is the most important technology to enable this transformation, provided the quality of each component therein is assured. So, any testing of the cloud migration platform should encompass every phase of migration right from the start.

James Daniel is a software Tech enthusiastic & works at Cigniti Technologies. I'm having a great understanding of today's software testing quality that yields strong results and always happy to create valuable content & share thoughts.