12-27-21 | Blog Post
A 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 including cost savings, increased security, greater flexibility, and increased performance. But if you’ve decided to move your important business data and applications to the cloud, you should also have a comprehensive application migration testing strategy in place.
Application migration done incorrectly could result in broken compliance, security loopholes, and extended downtime, all of which could result in financial loss to an organization. Testing applications after migrating to make sure that they are stable, functional, and compatible with the new cloud environment.
In this article, you’ll learn more about why you should test your applications after migrating to the cloud, the three stages of application testing, and what you need to test after migrating your applications.
After migrating to the cloud you’ll want to ensure that mission-critical data, applications, and interfaces are still accessible. It’s best to find out now rather than later a third-party application wasn’t fully integrated, or that decision-making data can’t be accessed. This helps to avoid loss of revenue or unexpected operational costs in the future.
During the migration process, security controls and compliance configurations may be broken creating security gaps and vulnerabilities that could be exploited by a cybercriminal. Testing your applications after a cloud migration ensures that all of your security mechanisms are still in place.
The application testing process is the time to make sure that new applications and technologies are compatible with the new cloud environment and other dependencies and meet industry compliance requirements. It would be an unpleasant surprise to find out that the new technology you need for a new business initiative isn’t functioning.
Testing your applications after a cloud migration is also a way to make sure that the applications are performing at the same or higher levels they were before the migration. The application testing phase allows you to look for settings and controls that can be tweaked to increase the overall scalability of your network system.
Depending on the application, scope, strategy, and testing scenarios may differ but the following are the three basic stages of application testing in the cloud:
Pre-migration testing, the first and most critical stage of the application migration testing process, determines the scope of the project. It’s also the most time-consuming because it requires a thorough study of both the old and the new systems to plan further testing scenarios and strategies.
This second stage tests the actual migration. The testing done during this stage ensures that all data from the old system is present in the new cloud environment and has been migrated to the correct locations.
The third and most important stage of application migration testing is post-migration testing. During this stage, follow-up tests are performed to ensure that all aspects of the migration were executed correctly. It includes an analysis of application performance, assessing database security, and observing the environment for potential disruptions.
Conducting integration tests after migrating your applications to the cloud, confirms that applications have integrated seamlessly with the new underlying infrastructure and other third-party applications. Integration testing includes checking that APIs and libraries are still working and that dependencies between applications have not been broken.
For successful integration testing, you’ll want to ask the following questions:
Many cloud providers provide integration validation as an additional service. If you don’t have in-house expertise, it might be worth it to spend a little extra to ensure an error-free integration.
Security is the most important factor when storing data in the cloud. Cloud-based environments come with advanced security technologies for mitigating some of the most sophisticated cyber-attacks.
Because new forms of malware and viruses are released every day, you’ll need to confirm that your data and network environment is still secure after cloud migration. Application security testing involves performing various tests including penetration testing, security audits, and vulnerability scans.
To create an effective plan for testing security, you’ll need to know:
During security testing, confirm the following:
The third process for determining the success of your application migration to the cloud involves accessing performance and response times. This important step ensures that your customers and end-users are still receiving at least the same levels of performance as they were before the migration.
Here are some areas you’ll need to access to ensure that performance expectations and service level agreements (SLA) with your cloud provider are being met:
During this process, you’re also likely to come across areas where workloads can be optimized to leverage the underlying advanced technologies in your new cloud environment.
Application testing is an important part of your cloud migration strategy that cannot be ignored. At Otava, we have the expertise to successfully migrate your digital assets to the cloud with minimal impact on your business operations. Contact us for more information about our services.
