Cloud Migration Testing: The First Step Toward Digital Transformation

Every journey begins with a single step. However, businesses must take the first step in the right direction. While you may be eager to start your cloud journey and have the momentum to proceed, it’s essential to pause and consider whether you have a cloud migration testing strategy to ensure successful migration.

Why Is Cloud Migration Testing Important?

The answer is simple: Migrating applications to the cloud presents challenges and involves uncharted territory. Enterprise cloud migration comprises rehosted, refactored, re-platformed, rearchitected, replaced, or retired applications, more commonly known as the R-treatment. The migration strategy or the R-treatment applied to the application is directly tied to the customer’s business goals. Click here to gain deeper insights into how Hexaware integrates agile processes and tech expertise to prioritize user needs and revamp your application landscape. 

While migrating to the cloud can simplify many organizational processes and accelerate growth, it also introduces complexity due to the diverse use of services and distributed components. To ensure seamless cloud migration, it is essential to implement the right cloud migration test strategy with the assistance of experienced experts. A proper cloud migration testing approach can assess application behavior before and after migration, preventing surprises and safeguarding your enterprise.  

The testing methods that must be applied should be customized based on the application’s R-treatment. This critical process should include thorough testing of functional, integration, security, performance parameters, identity and access management, databases and data flow processing, reliability, accessibility, and usability. 

Cloud Migration Testing Checklist for Successful Migration

The blueprint for a successful cloud migration test strategy comprises testing methods, the proper tooling selections, and environment management. Let’s examine them more closely.

Infrastructure Testing 

This initial test would validate the infrastructure components’ sanity and connectivity. Although not a core testing team responsibility, this testing will validate infrastructure configuration, including CPU, disk, memory, network connectivity between servers, firewall rules setup, port status, running services, etc.

Functional Testing 

This test confirms that every build meets the business and regulatory requirements for application and service functionality after the cloud migration, either by conducting manual tests or through automation suites. 

Identity & Access Management Testing 

A subset of functional testing, this test validates role-based access controls and user privileges in application functionality.   

Integration Testing 

This testing is critical to verify that all connected services and apps can seamlessly share data across the cloud and on-premises. 

Multi-Channel & Compatibility Testing 

Applications on web and mobile devices should be tested under different browsers, devices, and networks. While exhaustive testing may not be feasible, a representative set of the most used devices and browser combinations should be used to validate the functionality. 

Data-Centric Testing 

Data integrity and accuracy during migration are critical. As part of the migration, databases are moved to the cloud or re-platformed. This requires complete validation of database metadata and data reconciliation between source and target to ensure migration accuracy and data is intact. 

Security Testing 

Security Testing is a must to identify and prevent security vulnerabilities in the application and services layer, thereby reducing security-related downtimes and monetary loss. 

Performance Testing 

Performance testing measures an application’s ability to handle concurrent user and data volumes, infrastructure capacity, and autoscaling. It ensures application SLAs are met, and cloud migration does not introduce additional latencies or performance degradation. 

Accessibility Testing 

This testing is mainly conducted to validate that web and mobile applications are built to defined accessibility standards, such as WCAG, 508 compliance, etc.  

Resiliency Testing 

Application and service resiliency and reliability are key, as moving to the cloud introduces a host of distributed components such as microservices, queues, cloud-native services, and managed services. A service’s unavailability can have ripple effects on the entire ecosystem. It is recommended that the critical services and components be identified, fault injections be conducted, and results be validated. 

Disaster Recovery & Operational Acceptance Testing 

This testing is usually conducted towards the end of the testing lifecycle. While the application and enterprise infrastructure teams drive this, the testing team assists in validating the application’s functionality, availability, and readiness. Typical test scenarios include verification after a restore operation, simulated conditions triggering alerts, application validation after a DR exercise, etc. 

Other essential aspects besides the tests mentioned above are the tooling, test environment management, and setup. It is always recommended to leverage existing toolsets and SaaS-based tool subscriptions, bearing in mind the cost and time for migration. The tools should include test management, test automation, test data management, service virtualization, performance, security, resiliency, and accessibility. Read this blog to gain a firmer grip on the essentials for a robust testing strategy and environment. 

Environment management should consider the necessary environments to conduct functional and non-functional tests. Data availability and scale of environments should be included as essential requirements before building it. Automating environment provisioning, spinning up new VMs needed for testing, terminating or stopping VMs when not in use, and including them as part of the pipeline will accelerate testing efforts and reduce dependency on other teams.

Benefits of Cloud Migration Testing

The benefits of cloud migration testing are numerous and can significantly improve an enterprises’ digital transformation efficiency. Some of the benefits are: 

• A cloud migration testing strategy sets the foundation for testing upcoming releases.  

• Tooling mechanisms and flexibility: The cloud offers native monitoring tools, a software marketplace for easy purchase, and flexible cost models such as pay-as-you-go that can help optimize license costs. 

• Flexibility in managing test environments with cost optimization benefits, which lets you enable and deploy environments when needed 

• Test environments and testing tools are available 24/7 for all team members and QA teams spread globally, allowing testing to be conducted anytime. This can lead to faster time-to-market. 

• Cloud-based testing tools scale with your business without any downtimes, ensuring high availability and supporting your scalability on demand. 

• SIs such as Hexaware can offer advanced tools, including those for test automation and performance. This gives businesses the power to unleash innovation and drive growth. 

Understanding Cloud Testing Limitations

While cloud computing offers flexibility, certain limitations must be considered when planning tests. Cloud providers usually set threshold limits (or throttling) at the tenant, services, subscription, or region levels.  

This will need to be understood while planning performance or security tests. For example, cloud providers such as AWS have limitations in simulating DDOS attacks. These limitations should also be captured in your test scope to clearly define and agree with stakeholders on what can be tested. 

You may also experience similar challenges with SaaS platforms (when your organization has replaced an existing CRM with a cloud SaaS CRM solution). Prior permissions and approvals should be sought to conduct tests with necessary services virtualized. 

How Hexaware’s Cloud Quality Assurance Can Help 

Quality assurance and testing are pivotal for successful cloud migration, and at Hexaware, we understand the importance of ensuring everything runs seamlessly and end-users don’t notice any disruptions. While many technology providers offer testing strategies for cloud migration, not all provide the same level of assurance. Some challenges in developing the right testing strategy can include the expense of migrating large volumes of data and live applications and ensuring adequate security. 

At Hexaware, we extensively study every aspect of your IT system using our cloud quality assurance framework. This framework incorporates the correct type of testing for each strategy, leverages open-source and in-house solutions, and avoids redundant testing costs while providing resiliency testing for microservices. This approach ensures that all data and systems are migrated to the cloud with zero or minimal downtime.  

Therefore, implementing the right testing strategy with the proper testing experts is crucial to easing the cloud migration testing process and ensuring your business maximizes the cloud’s capabilities while avoiding costly pitfalls. 

To learn more about how Hexaware can help you execute a successful testing strategy for cloud migration, please visit: Cloud Quality Assurance