What Enterprises Should Know About Testing the Cloud

The details of the cloud are still evolving, but for most enterprises the cloud is a set of services, data, resources and networks located “elsewhere.” This contrasts with the historical centralized data center model – where enterprises purchased, configured, deployed and maintained their own servers, storage, networks and infrastructures.

As enterprises continue to adopt cloud services, they should ensure functionality, performance and security before deployment in order to provide the necessary functions and performance of cloud-based applications. To do so, it is important to understand the cloud services available today, and how enterprises can cost-effectively ensure the safe deployment of those services.

Cloud Service Offerings

First, let’s take a look at the resources of the cloud. While owned and maintained by a “cloud service provider,” these resources are often “borrowed” by the enterprise. Typical service offerings include:

• Software-as-a-Service – Examples include Salesforce.com, Google Apps, SAP, Taleo, WebEx, and Facebook. These are full-service applications accessed from anywhere on the Internet and are implemented through the use of distributed data centers.
• Platform-as-a-Service – Examples include Windows Azure, Google AppEngine, Force.com, Heroku, and Sun/Oracle. These are distributed development platforms used to create applications, web pages and services that run in cloud environments.
• Infrastructure-as-a-Service – Examples include offerings by VMware, Citrix, Dell, HP, IBM, Disco, F5, Juniper and others. These companies offer the building blocks of cloud services that are available through a number of cloud hosting services such as Amazon’s Elastic Computing Cloud (EC2). They include a virtualization layer, database, web, and application servers, firewalls, server load balancers, WAN optimizers, routers, and switches.

Why Move to the Cloud?

One of the most compelling reasons for adopting a cloud strategy is widespread availability of broadband networks such as 10 Gigabit Ethernet (GE) that connect the enterprise with cloud providers’ sites. Other reasons include cloud elasticity, scalability and performance.

Computing, storage and network resources are easily and quickly deployed using cloud providers, which allow an enterprise’s internal applications and/or external web site elastic to adapt to demand. This elasticity also provides the means of scaling to any size desired, and to match performance requirements and ensure customer SLAs are maintained and end-user experience is unaffected during peak utilization.