Validating Cloud-based Applications

Mitigate risks and realize the full business benefits of the Cloud

Cloud-based applications promise the strategic benefits of greater business agility combined with the financial flexibility to "pay as you go". Yet for all their benefits, enterprise cloud applications also introduce significant risks by increasing complexity, rate of change, and heterogeneity across highly distributed application architectures. This is compounded by a reduction in visibility and control for outsourced portions of the application.

Enterprise Cloud Application challenges:

• Difficult to continuously validate expected system behaviors and outcomes to ensure that functional, integrity, and Service Level Agreements are consistently met.
• Poor end-to-end transparency and traceability to understand how changes and failures could affect other interdependent systems.
• Limited ability to validate "what-if" scenarios to evaluate different service providers, understand system-wide ramifications of component performance problems, etc.
• No way to proactively and consistently enforce software quality when underlying components and services are constantly changing.
• Extended development and testing delays due to pervasive system dependencies and multiple software teams working under their own discontinuous development cycles.
• Inability to perform automating testing across the distributed, end-to-end application to lower the cost of quality.

The Solution

The benefits of cloud applications are compelling, but they require new solutions to ensure their success in enterprise environments. ITKO's LISA provides virtualization and validation capabilities that make it easier to build and deploy cloud applications in environments of complexity and constant change.

• Reduce risk through continuous validation of expected functional and performance outcomes, including simulated customer interactions to proactively identify problems and report them.
• Integrate event-based validation across the application lifecycle, including software builds, service publishing, policy changes, and other change points.
• Expose and trace the visual "path" of transactions within Cloud applications, including the inputs and outputs of each system or component within it.
• Leverage virtual service environments to isolate components and sub-systems of your application to observe potential failure conditions and conduct "what-if" analysis.
• Create a virtual model of any "off cloud" dependent system to simulate its dynamic behavior, data and performance for 24/7 access.
• Provide complete, automated test coverage across each layer of your Cloud application in a single test environment, lowering test cycle times and costs.

To learn more about how ITKO's LISA can help you harness the change and complexity in cloud architectures to your advantage so you can optimize the business benefits while minimizing unintended consequences, please contact us, or read more about LISA Virtualize, LISA Validate, LISA Test, and LISA Pathfinder.