To simplify and modernize their infrastructure, more and more development teams are migrating their test environments to the cloud.
Join the DZone community and get the full member experience. This article was published with permission from freelance writer, Justin Reynolds. Many companies today have outdated, inefficient, and complex IT test environments. This leads to a variety of pitfalls, such as high costs, workflow issues, reduced performance, and delayed releases, among others. To simplify and modernize their infrastructure, more and more development teams are migrating their test environments to the cloud. Keep reading to learn why businesses are moving in this direction, the benefits of testing in the cloud, and the tools you need to make it all happen. When companies lack robust testing capabilities, development teams will unquestionably face the following issues. Companies that use disparate testing technologies often lack visibility into test bookings. Consequently, this leads to scheduling conflicts and poor resource allocation. This is especially problematic for companies with multiple teams that share resources. Environment contention can create internal conflict and impede collaboration, slowing down timelines and making it that much harder to reach your goals. IT leaders typically have limited transparency into data and configurations across test environments. In fact, the vast majority of companies (95%) have no idea what their end-to-end IT and test environments look like. Unfortunately, this lack of visibility makes it impossible to track progress, manage workflows, and improve outcomes. IT environments often contain large volumes of sensitive data. Yet organizations tend to be lax about security privacy guidelines in test environments. This puts sensitive data at risk, leading to costly incidents, reputational damage, and other penalties. In one high-profile example, the Federal Trade Commission (FTC) cracked down on Uber for failing to secure its test environments. For testing environments to be effective, managers need deep visibility into testing and performance data.
