The Significance of Software Testing for a Successful Cloud Migration
By: Debjani Goswami
Tags: Software Testing, Business Transformation, Cybersecurity, Cloud Migration, Quality Assurance

While we need to keep updating the physical infrastructure, the necessity for cloud migration is evident in every sector. However, migrating data to a cloud platform does not involve a single step or a solution. The primary focus is to leverage the cloud platform from the standpoint of infrastructure, and that would possibly include changes in configuration for capacity planning.

Furthermore, it is equally vital to witness no changes are being made to the code or the concerned website’s architecture. To ensure that the performance, functional flow, data, and access control security privileges remain intact, cloud migration testing is inevitable.

QA testing helps prevent issues related to cloud scalability and server breakdown. These may include crashing of application/website, errors in the database, and other malfunctions that can ruin your cloud migration’s success and can be extremely risky in terms of reputation, time, and resources of your brand.

The most challenging part about cloud migration testing lies in the performance. Whether the cloud migration led to slower performance, or whether there is an enhanced performance post-migration, as compared to the previous implementation in physical infrastructure, these questions remain critical.

Also, from the perspective of capacity planning, the performance requires monitoring accordingly. Post the Website’s cloud migration process; validation is necessary to ensure that the data and the functional flows are intact. It would help if you also implemented a concurrent proof of data migration from the physical systems to the cloud.

The Importance of Functional Testing

Functional testing or validation to check whether you are cloud-ready assesses how much production-ready are migrated applications. You also need to conduct a thorough analysis of the various features and verify whether it meets SLA (Service Level Agreement) compliance.

For an effective cloud migration, you must validate from end-to-end the functions of the applications.

Take note of the following checklist:

Check whether you achieve the expected output through a valid input.

Check for the compatibility of the automated test suite with the application’s cloud environment.

Check whether service integrations are complete with all other applications.

Check for the proper functioning of the object references.

Check for compatibility across all platforms.

The Significance of Integration Testing:

It is equally essential to ensure seamless integration of your applications with third-party apps. A necessary aspect of cloud migration testing is also to check for flawless communication among all the applications.

Check the applications’ dependencies and the several SLAs involved with every application.

For more than one application, the complications in the process of migration increase.

So, the validations below can help in streamlining the process:

Check for systems and interfaces that require coverage for testing the integrations.

Determine what resources are necessary to validate the integration testing.

Check plans for devising and executing tests for the third-party components.

Determine how to detect communication issues in the new cloud environment.

Importance of Security Testing:

Major obstacles in cloud migration are security issues. Applications can be very secure in the cloud, but there is no hardware, unlike conventional storage, which means there is no complete control over the data. To keep the data secure in the cloud requires a whole new level of security procedures and strategies.

The below-mentioned checkpoints must be kept in mind while performing security validation:

• Make sure that only authorized users can access your cloud network.

• Ensure preventive measures are handy to protect against standard attacks and ensure the determined strategies’ proper functioning.

• Make sure the data security is validated when at rest, in use, and during transit.

Some other security testing features comprise privacy testing, data security, business process security, and application security.

The Significance of Performance Testing:

Equally essential is to assess the application performance and the response time after the transition to the cloud environment is completed. This also determines the success of the migration. This assessment also optimizes the workload distribution across all the resources.

Things to check during this phase:

• Check if the cloud platform supports the architecture of the application.

• Validate the response times as defined in the SLAs.

• Load test parallelly as to get an idea about the services’ performance under different levels of load.

Even though theoretically, the organizations receive all the information, practically, cloud migration is challenging in many instances. Therefore, the process needs precision. Consequently, it is advisable to invest in a team of experienced Quality assurance professionals for a hassle-free and seamless cloud migration.