Gartner predicts end-user spending on public cloud services is expected to reach over $482 billion in 2022, up from $396 billion in 2021, Additionally, by 2026, Gartner forecasts that the cloud market will take over 45% of overall IT spending on system infrastructure, and application software, up from less than 17% in 2021.

Table 1. Worldwide Public Cloud Services End-User Spending Forecast (Millions of U.S. Dollars)

BPaaS = business process as a service; IaaS = infrastructure as a service; PaaS = platform as a service; SaaS = software as a service
Note: Totals may not add up due to rounding.

Organizations, to stay relevant in the current dynamic markets, need to continuously innovate and deliver a differentiated value to their customers. With the adoption of the cloud, businesses can focus on innovation by harnessing the benefits of the digital environment, scalability, faster time to market and cost efficiency.

While there are various stated benefits of migrating applications to the cloud, there are inherent challenges as well if due diligence is not done.

Challenges in cloud adoption:

Data security: Security is of paramount importance considering the ever-increasing threat vectors. Additional security measures are needed and due planning is required before migrating to the cloud. The user credentials, cloud services provider’s security controls, and patch management play an important role in ensuring cloud security.

Following are key enablers to achieve security in your cloud journey.

• Designing base security controls to develop secure landing zones on the cloud service provider platform.
• Creation of reusable templates with integrated security controls for a platform as a service
• Integrate operational processes & procedures with enterprise security tools combining platforms and services.
• Create role-based access control and define what access to be provided to each role
• Design policies on monitoring, configuring and change management for platform security controls.

While organizations are adapting their cloud implementations and there are true benefits in terms of making it lighter, faster and more accessible from customer point of view, security risk are also huge. In order to balance the security and speed, companies should continuously work to develop their capabilities on:

• Know your security posture and review it regularly
• Automate native security
• Be proactive with compliance and bring automation in it
• Employ comprehensive security monitoring and response

Service Quality: Organizations put Disaster Recovery systems in place where on-premise systems are involved.  We have seen in the recent past, where major cloud service providers have experienced outages and applications such as Facebook have suffered globally. Hence, we firmly believe it is the cloud provider’s responsibility to move the application to the cloud and assure on availability. Service quality of cloud services can be analyzed on the parameters of autoscaling, performance, latency, availability and responsiveness.

SLAs are to be defined and agreed with cloud service providers on key aspects such as:

• Data privacy
• Data ownership and control
• Service availability
• Quality of service parameters and their monitoring
• Change management process to modify SLAs

Performance: While cloud services are available everywhere to everyone, the experience is not the same for all users, it can differ due to internet speed, network fluctuations and the application architecture design. Performance tuning and configuration play a vital role in achieving optimal application performance generating a great user experience.

Performance-related issues include the geographical proximity of data to the end-user, network speed within the cloud to the external interfaces, speed between computation later and various data stores as well as to the end-users.

Governance: Cloud-based systems provide scalability, agility and faster time to market, on the other side they provide limited control on how infrastructure is provided and operated. Strict governance measures are to be used with agreed upon policies and procedures with cloud service providers, in order to safeguard organizational interests.

Few points to consider for cloud governance:

• Organizations to focus on governing how their employees are using cloud services intending to reducing cloud spending, improving auditability and optimizing security risks
• Perform risk analysis on what can be controlled in agreement with the cloud services provider
• Implement risk controls for cloud service provider vendor management program by continuously monitoring an action plan for identified quality levels.

Cloud adoption is beneficial if augmented with cloud assurance services: With carefully designed cloud adoption and migration assurance covering performance, user experience, and security aspects, cloud migration can be a smooth operation paving the way to achieve digital transformation, innovation as well as agility of operation for the organizations.

IGT’s migration assurance platform provides comprehensive testing services across the cloud migration lifecycle.

Connect with our cloud migration assurance experts to understand more about  achieving  cloud transformation without worrying about the challenges of security, performance and user experience.

Source: Gartner

Author:

Yatender has 20+ years of experience in software test engineering. As the head of Testing Practice at IGT Solutions, Yatender is actively involved in innovations related to test engineering covering new tools, technologies, and solutions, and enabling IGT’s clients to achieve faster time to market quality improvement, and optimization of developer efforts in overall SDLC. A result-oriented leader, proficient in delivering high customer value and achieving excellence in service delivery management with proven skills in consulting and managing large and complex test programs. When away from work, he enjoys reading on a variety of topics and spending time with kids.

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Both the IT industry and software testing domains have different yet relevant trends that organizations should be focused on to remain relevant.

Let’s look at some key areas of software testing that will see a lot of traction in the year 2022

Hyper Automation Testing: The new trend around the block will take a platform-based approach where test automation of web applications, mobile apps and desktop apps will take place with a heterogeneous tool set. We will also see a growth in open source tools as well as low code platform for automation testing. The year 2022 will also see a greater focus on implementing In-Sprint Automation, wherein testing teams are performing functional testing in 1 to 2-week sprints, designing and executing automated test cases within a sprint is bound to provide benefits of shift-left, quality improvement and faster time to market.

Another trend is to take automation to next level, called as Hyper-automation, that combines the power of AI/ML and automation technologies. This will help achieve faster, scalable, high-quality product development.

The use of AI will help to automate the areas within the automation testing process, which are still performed manually such as functional test case writing, identifying regression, impact analysis etc.

Artificial Intelligence and Machine learning: Artificial intelligence is already implemented in several use cases in the industry and its effectiveness is increasing as the days pass:

There are several uses of artificial intelligence in software testing:

• Risk prediction in code-based historical data and key variables
• Optimization of testing efforts and timelines based on risk profiles
• Fine-tuning of regression suite and self-healing frameworks
• Analysis of application logs, identification of errors and automatically find failure reason
• Prediction of key test configurations and quality index levels

Security Testing: There has been an increase in the use of IT applications in the last few years, we have observed an exponential increase during the covid period, in addition to that, we also saw a sharp rise in cyber security incidents including ransomware. The positive effect of all these problems is the enhanced focus that organizations are now putting on the security testing of the applications, systems and infrastructure. The year 2022 will see greater traction on security testing right from pipeline security to DevSecOps to penetration testing. As security is picking up fast and has a large attack surface area, it’s important to perform security testing in layers. A customized security testing strategy will have a combination of DAST, SAST, IAST and API security tests spread across guidelines from NIST, COBIT, ISO 27001 and PCI DSS.

As per the world risk report 2022 of the World Economic Forum, the cyber vulnerability data trend is worrying:

• 435% increase in ransomware in 2020
• 3 million gaps in cyber professionals needed worldwide
• 800 billion estimated growth in value of digital commerce by 2024
• 95% of cybersecurity issues are traced to human error

Companies need to upgrade their infrastructure and ramp up staff skills to tackle cyber vulnerabilities. Security testing can help alleviate cyber risks by shift-left and implementing a continuous security testing pipeline.

UX/CX Testing: User experience is increasingly becoming a key factor in customer engagement and helps retain the existing user base. There will be an additional push to achieve a good user experience for applications used by organizations, especially websites and mobile apps. This is of utmost importance for organizations that use such web or mobile applications for business e.g. ecommerce, insurance, etc.

There is a plethora of tools available both in open source as well licensed categories spanning from user profiling, customer journey mapping, accessibility, user persona analysis, sentimental analysis etc. The best approach to UX/CX testing will be to understand the business flow, Application landscape, target customer segment, customer touchpoints, marketing mix and competitor analysis.

Performance Engineering: Performance of the application is imperative from a usability standpoint and users see it as a primary factor to either continue using the application or discard it. The organization’s focus will now be on the performance and results right from the architecture designing level to usage on production.

The market has seen some good traction in the performance testing tool segment, such as:

• Tricentis acquired Neotys
• Perfecto acquired Blazemeter

These trends are clearly giving good signs as performance testing is going to become a part of the DevOps cycle, performance as a pipeline. It will be great to see full pipeline testing for non-functional areas including security, accessibility and performance.

Agile, DevOps and Lean: Agile has helped organizations to bring the teams together and remove the compartments of BA, developer, tester, system engineer etc. and has set up expert teams that are working together to deliver good quality deliveries. Similarly, DevOps ensures that applications are deployed frequently and automatically thereby enabling faster value delivery to end users. Lean helps in the continuous improvement, removing the extra waste from the system and processes.

These practices take place at various stages in the organization and this year will see further adoption among its teams.

Continuous and automated testing enabled with CI/CD pipelines augmented with AI will help achieve faster & quality software delivery thereby enhancing customer experience.

Conclusion

The future of testing in the year 2022 will be more technology-enabled. If you are looking for more updates on upcoming trends of testing and how to prepare your teams to harness it, you can connect with me at  Yatender.sharma@igtsolutions.azurewebsites.net

Source: Gartner

Author:

Yatender has 20+ years of experience in software test engineering. As the head of Testing Practice at IGT Solutions, Yatender is actively involved in innovations related to test engineering covering new tools, technologies, and solutions, and enabling IGT’s clients to achieve faster time to market quality improvement, and optimization of developer efforts in overall SDLC. A result-oriented leader, proficient in delivering high customer value and achieving excellence in service delivery management with proven skills in consulting and managing large and complex test programs. When away from work, he enjoys reading on a variety of topics and spending time with kids.

The post Software Testing Trends: What to expect in 2022 appeared first on IGT Solutions.