Once you have decided to move your business to the cloud, a comprehensive testing plan is crucial for the cloud migration’s success. It will ensure that you do not face server breakdown issues, database errors and other glitches which can impede a successful migration to the cloud.

QA Focus for Cloud Migration Success

The main focus of cloud migration testing is on the various validations required to ensure its success.

Functional Testing

In functional validation, the production-readiness of the migrated applications is tested. A detailed analysis is performed for its various aspects and checked for SLA-compliance. To ensure the success of your cloud migration, perform end-to-end validation of the applications’ functions. 

• Check whether a valid input gives the desired output.
• Check whether service integrations with other applications are complete.
• Check whether object references are working as expected.
• Check whether cross-platform compatibility is ensured.

Integration Testing

Ensuring your applications are integrated seamlessly with third-party applications and that the communication between them is happening without errors is an integral part of migration testing. Chalk out the dependencies between applications, and the different SLAs that each application comes with. If you are integrating multiple applications, the cloud migration process tends to become more complicated. Consider the following validations to simplify the process.

• What interfaces and systems should be covered for integration testing?
• What are the resources needed for validation and integration testing?
• What plan is in place to develop and execute tests with third-party components?
• How will you identify coordination problems in the cloud environment?

Several cloud providers also provide integration validation as an add-on to their services, which can help ensure error-free integration testing.

Security Testing

Initially, the biggest deterrent for organizations to move their operations to the cloud was concern over security. Backed by several advancements in the field, cloud security now comes with features that can prevent even sophisticated attacks from gaining access to your data and applications. Consider the following while you perform security validation:

• Ensure that your cloud network can be accessed only by authorized users.
• Keep in place preventive measures against common attacks, and ensure that the measures are working properly.
• Validate data security at rest, in use, and during transit. 

A few other aspects of security testing include data security, privacy testing, application security, and business process security.

Performance Testing

Assessing the performance and response time of the applications moved to the cloud is important for determining cloud migration success. This step will also help in optimizing the workload across resources. Here are a few things you need to consider while performing performance validation.

• Check whether the application’s architecture is supported by the cloud.
• Validate response times as per SLAs.
• Perform load testing in parallel to understand how your services perform under various load types.

Despite having all the help that organizations can get on paper, cloud migration is often tricky to execute and can result in more problems than benefits if executed incorrectly. Therefore, it is advisable to bring a team of testing professionals on-board for a successful cloud migration. 

At CloudNow Technologies, we provide Testing as a Service for organizations who want to make a trouble-free move to the cloud. Get in touch with us to know more.