Why Application Testing Is So Important For A Successful Cloud Migration?

Moving applications and data to the cloud has helped organizations with functionality and flexibility. Migrating to the cloud is a strategic move, and organizations are adopting the cloud to realize various business benefits. Using cloud-based services is relatively more efficient, highly secure, and increases productivity, without any performance failures in the seamless expansion mode and safe operating environment. In addition to a reasonable pricing model, the use of multi-tenant features cannot be matched by the local infrastructure. Cloud migration testing can meet many business needs, such as improving operational efficiency, upgrading customer experience, providing omni-channel experience, and so on.

Many cloud platform providers (such as Azure, Google Cloud Platform, and AWS) provide these high-yield services. They curb high procurement costs and provide services for expensive physical equipment to test applications/software before releasing products on the market.

A recent Forbes report states that “By 2020 a staggering 83% of the company workload will be stored on the cloud” which implies that many companies are already transferring their data and hosting their applications in the cloud. Another recent O’Reilly survey shows that 25% of businesses plan to move all their applications to the cloud within the next year. More and more businesses are leveraging the many benefits of the cloud. A report by Gartner forecasts that worldwide public cloud revenue will grow exponentially through 2022. Almost one-fourth of cloud budgets are spent on cloud-related services such as cloud consulting, implementation, migration, and managed services.

Through this blog, we have consolidated our Subject Matter Experts’ thoughts on why you should test your applications after migrating to the cloud, why Cloud Migration is not complete without Testing, and What to test when migrating your application to the cloud.

Why Should You Test Your Applications After Migrating to the Cloud?

1. Avoid Hacking from Cybercriminals:
   During the migration process, security controls and compliance configurations may be destroyed, resulting in security vulnerabilities, which cybercriminals may take advantage of. Testing your application after the cloud migration ensures that all security mechanisms still exist.
2. Improved Scalability:
   It also ensures that the application is running at the same or higher performance as before the migration. During the application testing phase, you can find settings and controls that can be adjusted to improve the overall scalability of the network system.
3. Reduced O&M Costs:
   After migrating to the cloud, you need to ensure that mission-critical data, applications, and interfaces are still accessible. It is better to find out now, rather than later discovering that the third-party application is not yet fully integrated or has no access to the decision data. This helps avoid loss of revenue or unexpected Operations and Maintenance (O&M) costs in the future.
4. Compatibility Check:
   The application testing process also makes sure that new applications and technologies are compatible with the new cloud environment and meet industry compliance requirements. Nobody likes to find out that the new technology is not compatible with the new environment or with your application.

Why is Cloud Migration Incomplete Without Testing?

To ease the cloud migration testing process for QA teams, it is important to implement the right test strategy. With the right test automation strategy in place, IT companies and QA testers can carry out cloud migration within an optimal time and take their product to the market sooner. There are tremendous benefits when Test automation is carried out using cloud testing platforms like AWS Device Farm, Sauce Labs, and Xamarin Test Cloud. Some of these benefits are:

• Use appropriate quality gates to handle many test cases.
• Using automation to accelerate cloud migration testing.
• Expanded the scope of testing in platforms, browsers, and devices.
• Effective communication and collaboration with stakeholders.
• Parallel execution.
• Test reporting.
• Seamless DevOps integration.
• Scalability.
• Reduced infrastructure costs.
• Advanced analysis of test results.

What to Test When Migrating Your Application to the Cloud?

1. Application Integration:
   After migrating your application to the cloud, perform integration tests to confirm that the application has been seamlessly integrated with the new infrastructure and other third-party applications. Integration testing includes checking whether APIs and libraries are still working and whether the dependencies between applications have been broken. In order to successfully perform integration testing, you need to be vary of the systems and interfaces that should be tested for integration, the resources you need to ensure effective verification and integration testing, the plan to test third-party components, and the mechanisms you can use to identify coordination issues in the new cloud environment. It is always worthwhile to spend a few extra bucks to ensure that there are no errors in the integration.
2. Application Security:
   When storing data in the cloud, security is the most important factor. The cloud-based environment comes with advanced security technologies that can mitigate some of the most complex cyber-attacks. Since new forms of malware and viruses are released every day, you need to confirm that the data and network environment are still safe after the cloud migration. Application security testing involves performing various tests, including penetration testing, security audits, and vulnerability scanning. To develop an effective security testing plan, you need to know the type of sensitive data that you store, use or transmit as well as users who can access this data. One needs to be also cognizant of what compliance requirements need to be considered and what data access controls are available. During the security test, please ensure that only authorized users can access your cloud network, preventive measures against common threats are in place and functioning normally and the data in transit, in use, and sitting idle is properly secured.
3. Application Performance:
   The final process of determining the successful migration is performance and response times. This important step ensures that your customers and end-users still get at least the same level of performance as before the migration. You need to ensure that performance expectations and your SLAs with the cloud provider are met. You need to carefully identify and document the end-to-end process of all business applications; identify and resolve any application architecture not supported by the cloud; determine monitoring requirements and set up appropriate tools and perform load testing in parallel with traditional networks to confirm response time is in accordance with the SLAs.

In the process, you may also encounter areas where workloads can be optimized to take advantage of the underlying advanced technologies in the new cloud environment.

Application Testing is a very important part of cloud migration strategy that cannot be ignored. At Pratiti, we possess rich expertise with devising Cloud Strategies, building and testing Cloud-Native Applications, Cloud specific frameworks, Microservices development, Managed Services, and more. If you are looking to adopt cloud or migrate your applications to the cloud, do get in touch with us today for a seamless experience.

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