Moving to the cloud not only enables application development and testing organizations to reduce capital outlays; it can also reduce IT cycle times while improving quality.

1. • Cognizant Reports
Leveraging Cloud for Non-Production
Environments
Moving to the cloud not only enables application development and testing
organizations to reduce capital outlays; it can also reduce IT cycle times
while improving quality.
cognizant reports | January 2014

2. Executive Summary
Organizations are operating in a tough business
environment marked by stiff competition, increasing regulations and dynamic consumer behavior. Given the escalating dependence on IT for
competitive advantage, technology projects
are growing in number, scope and complexity,
even while cycle times are narrowing. This puts
pressure on development and testing teams,
many of which are struggling with insufficient
in-house infrastructures and budget constraints.
The cloud addresses the traditional limitations
of in-house IT environments, including the huge
costs associated with buying, building, running
and maintaining IT infrastructure, as well as the
time delays in provisioning IT services.
Cloud architectures also provide immediate
and cost-effective access to a vast pool of computing resources, resulting in reduced cycle times.
Cloud facilitates real-time collaboration among
developers, testing teams and other stakeholders,
who can more readily test and share feedback to
positively impact application behavior at the enduser level.
Additionally, the cloud’s pay-per-use model
provides financial flexibility by reducing Op-Ex
and eliminating the need for upfront Cap-Ex,
allowing teams to create sophisticated labs, which
are not always feasible in-house.
While there are many success stories of early
adopters, several factors have caused some
IT organizations to tread cautiously or avoid cloud
altogether. These issues include security, lack
of control over data and infrastructure, the
complexity of seamless integration of internal
legacy systems and cloud management. However,
most challenges can be overcome by:
• Basing your evaluation of moving to the cloud
on clearly identified business requirements.
the cultural and process
changes that must be overcome to effectively
embrace cloud computing.
• Utilizing IT and non-production teams to
ascertain the overall organization’s preparedness to move to the cloud, manage legacy systems, and ensure that development and test
environments match business requirements.
• Establishing processes and proper administration to manage cloud utilization and costs.
• Understanding
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• Carefully evaluating vendors and their terms
and conditions. Organizations would do
well to partner with providers capable of
assessing their cloud needs and delivering
managed services to leverage the true power
of the cloud.
Forces Driving Cloud Testing
Because of the growing reliance on software
to enhance productivity and gain competitive advantage, development and testing (or
“non-production”) teams are now required to
quickly and nimbly deliver a greater number of
core run-the-business applications. The truth is, IT
departments are challenged to keep up. Roughly
94% of IT executives surveyed by IDG Research
for Delphix, a provider of agile data management
services, said it is difficult to deliver projects on
time and budget, with 76% saying the level of
difficulty is either increasingly aggravated or
staying the same. The level of difficulty is greater
during development (48%), followed by testing
(38%), according to the 108 executives surveyed.1
We believe the time has come to think beyond the
manual creation of in-house testing environments
and utilize cloud computing for testing, especially
with the following pressures that IT organizations
face:
Time-to-Market Pressure
Due to stiff competition, businesses are increasingly releasing and updating customer-facing
and internal applications to retain existing
customers and attract new ones. This places
enormous pressure on non-production teams
to quickly turn around projects. However,
procuring computing and storage resources for
application development and testing is no easy
task. It involves seeking permission and budget
sanctions from IT teams, which typically takes
several weeks. Improper scheduling of projects
and sharing of resources among multiple teams
sometimes lead to non-availability of resources,
resulting in unwarranted delays. Further, this
approach is not suitable for handling sudden
spikes in demand for non-production activity.
Challenges with In-house Environments
Software applications are becoming large and
complex as IT touches more business functions
and grows in importance, particularly in the
consumer products and services industry. For
instance, a hundred million lines of software code
2

3. are built into today’s high-end cars; meanwhile,
the U.S. government’s healthcare Web site
(www.healthcare.gov) has 500 million lines of
code, and Facebook runs on more than 60 million
lines of code.2
Many times, the infrastructure provided
for non-production environments is obsolete and does not scale. Poorly built environments cannot support the rigorous
needs of application development and do not
facilitate full test coverage, resulting in defects
creeping into production. Unscheduled infrastructure maintenance that causes environment
unavailability and downtime at inopportune times
is not uncommon. With development projects
becoming increasingly distributed, traditional
approaches can no longer guarantee continuous communication and high-level collaboration
among geographically dispersed non-production teams. Moreover, in addition to their core
activities, non-production teams are sometimes
required to manage environments due to a lack
of resources.
Cost Pressure
Despite the economic rebound, IT budgets have
been flat to negative since the dot-com bust of
2002 and were projected to be slightly down
this year, with a weighted global average decline
of 0.5%, according to the Gartner Executive
Programs survey of 2,053 global CIOs in the
fourth quarter of 2012.3 Non-production projects require large Cap-Ex budgets to purchase
application development and testing tools, hardware, etc. and maintain them. Working with limited budgets may prohibit teams from fully and
reliably executing projects that meet business
objectives. This increases project risk and may
require organizations to incur additional expenditures to deploy resources in order to purge
software of defects, contend with application rollout delays and manage customer frustration.
Demand Variations
Demand for non-production activity is sporadic,
typically involving crests and prolonged troughs.
Hence, computing resources procured to meet
demand often remain underutilized when demand
recedes. Teams also tend to retain non-production
environments created for a particular assignment
in the event they are needed again due to setup
complexity, thus locking up computing resources.
It is, therefore, not surprising that 70% of the IT
budget is allocated to keeping idle servers turned
on, according to CloudTimes.org.4
Moving to the Cloud
Nearly half (47%) of 542 organizations in the
U.S. and Europe already use the cloud for
application development and testing, with another
43% planning to move (see Figure 1), according to
a survey by Luth Research and Vanson Bourne,
sponsored by CA Technologies.5
Existing IT environments in many organizations do not support the growing infrastructural needs and other business requirements
Applications Moving to Cloud
Back-office (HR/CRM)
5555
38
6
Consumer-facing
5757
37
6
Core LOB
51
51
48
10
Test/Development
47
47
43
10
51
51
Communication/VOIP
52
52
Workforce Productivity
0%
18
34
40%
20%
Are currently in cloud
12
37
4848
IT Security
7
39
52
IT Management
8
40
54
54
Web Infrastructure
9
40
60%
Are planning to move to cloud
80%
Will never move to cloud
Source: “TechInsights Report: Cloud Succeeds. Now What?” CA Technologies, May 2013.
Figure 1
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3
100%

4. of non-production teams, as well as quick turnaround objectives. Developers and testers require
more flexible and streamlined workflow processes
and on-demand access to computing resources
to accelerate delivery. Moving non-production
activities to the cloud delivers much-needed
operational agility, as well as cost advantages, in
addition to the following benefits
•
Streamlined application delivery: Cloudbased environments provide on-demand
access to a vast array of computing resources,
such as the browsers, servers, operating systems, application builds, etc. required to build
and operate sophisticated environments. The
self-service model allows teams to easily build,
change and scale up and down environments
almost instantly, without the involvement of
the core IT organization.
This reduces wait times
and tightens the overall development cycle.
As infrastructure is not
owned by the company,
teams can focus on coding and innovation without worrying about infrastructure maintenance
issues.
As infrastructure is
not owned by the
company, teams
can focus on coding
and innovation
without worrying
about infrastructure
maintenance.
• It is not always an option to reproduce and
resolve bugs with limited in-house resources,
and when it is, these tasks are often
time-consuming and challenging to complete. The cloud allows rapid reproduction of
bugs without worrying about scale. Moreover,
Quick Take
Panasonic’s Venture into the Cloud
With the amount of software embedded in automobiles growing rapidly and delivery cycles halved over
a three-year timeframe, Panasonic Automotive Systems Company of America (PASA) was hard-pressed
to deliver software systems quickly.
PASA, which manufactures in-vehicle infotainment (IVI) systems, employed distributed teams across
the globe and procured more bandwidth and other resources to meet the tight deadlines. But the
company was encountering long build times (running from 10 to 30 minutes and even 117 minutes for one
project, due to rapidly increasing source code) and unreliable builds, which slowed delivery and reduced
the time for testing. Collaboration was another issue, as development teams in Europe, India and Japan
were unable to use the same toolsets in the same ways and operate on the same processes as their
counterparts in the Atlanta-based data center even though they were linked.6
These integration and coordination issues prolonged the development lifecycle and boosted
expenditures on hardware and human resources, which increased project costs; meanwhile, existing IT
infrastructure was insufficient to meet demand peaks.7
These issues promoted PASA to move development to the cloud. The company used Electric
Cloud’s build acceleration and optimization software as a service (SaaS) and CloudOne PaaS. Moving to
the cloud helped PASA cut build time across many projects by about 400%, enhancing the overall
development velocity by 200%.8
The waiting period for developers submitting concurrent build requests was reduced from one hour
to 10 minutes. Reduced process cycle times provided more testing opportunities. With development
consolidated on the cloud, global teams could share and collaborate, as they had the same experience
for authentication, access to the same version and configuration of the development environment.9
The pay-per-use option, quick and easy access to tools and simpler resource consumption
tracking allowed PASA to handle growing IVI requirements without increasing its infrastructure spending
or development costs. Further, PASA was able to realize its ROI within two months of deploying the
solution.
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4

5. the cloud also facilitates secured real-time
collaboration among distributed teams
through shared access to virtual machines
that run test code. Developers and testers can
discuss and fix bugs iteratively in real-time,
allowing the dispersed team to deliver quality
output more quickly.
Cloud platforms reduce overall development
time by about 15%, on average, according
to a recent survey of more than 400 developers conducted in December 2012. (See sidebar,
previous page, for Panasonic’s venture into
the cloud).10
•
Financial flexibility: Pay-per-use is perhaps
the most attractive feature drawing more
companies toward the cloud. Using the cloud’s
platform-as-a-service (Paas) model, organizations can quickly spin up environments based
on requirements and scale down environments
when demand ebbs, paying only for what they
consume. With cloud computing, teams will
have access to the latest development and
testing tools, while organizations are liberated
from incurring Cap-Ex to buy infrastructure to
meet demand peaks and computing resources
that often remain idle during periods of low
demand.
Testing in the cloud can initially be more costly
than in-house testing, as organizations must
design their systems to work with the cloud’s
underlying architecture, which can consume
both time and money. However, over the
long term, this approach can save 30% to
40% of total expenditures, according to IDC.11
•
•
Quality: The cloud allows teams to create production-like environments that were
previously not feasible with in-house resources.
This allows extensive testing of applications
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Innovation: Moving to the cloud frees teams
from maintenance and troubleshooting
activities, enabling them to focus more on IT
strategies to drive business. Rapid prototyping allows organizations to quickly identify
whether a project is worth pursuing so that it
can decide early on whether to terminate it or
invest further, thus saving time and resources,
as well as increasing the pace of innovation.
Operational Challenges
As with any new technology, the cloud
presents new challenges, even while addressing
the limitations of a traditional non-production
development. Among these challenges are:
•
By not owning the IT infrastructure, organizations also cut infrastructure maintenance and
support costs, as well as the number of human
resources required to support non-production
teams, which reduces Op-Ex. Additional cost
benefits stem from factors such as optimal
compute, storage and software utilization
through virtualization; reduction in support
costs through standardization; and reduced
manual intervention through automation.
with different network configurations to
simulate how they will behave with real end
users so that there are no surprises once
the application is put into production. Teams
can develop prototypes faster, evaluate their
performance and gain feedback from users,
designers and other stakeholders iteratively.
This ensures that the application aligns
with user requirements, reduces the need
for changes in the development phase, and
improves the reliability of the applications.
Security and control: Safeguarding data
and the lack of control over infrastructure
are perhaps the biggest reasons many organizations move cautiously when it comes to
cloud adoption. Since all services are hosted
remotely, the organization often does not know
where the data is stored and the servers are
located. There is no clarity on what happens
to the data if a vendor suddenly exits from the
cloud business or the contract expires. Organizations must keep track of all the data stored
in the cloud; otherwise, sensitive business data
might be left in the public cloud forever.
Recent cloud outages12 at major cloud
vendors have fueled doubts about cloud’s
efficiency. However, over time, cloud vendors
have experienced fewer outages, and they
often provide better uptime and use the latest
security systems compared with in-house
data centers. Organizations must perform due
diligence to evaluate security and contingency
aspects while choosing a vendor (see sidebar,
next page).
5

6. Quick Take
A Cloud Suitor Checklist
Attributes of an effective cloud partner include:
• Availability of a vast pool of computing resources with the latest skills.
• Ability to complement the non-production team’s skill set and support requirements.
• Demonstrated level of security and regulatory compliance.
• Documented cloud reliability and high service availability.
• Transparency in pricing and provision of cost calculators.
• Range of technical support provided.
•
Integrating legacy systems: Many organizations still depend on legacy applications and
platforms for critical business processes. The
complex interdependency of these systems
often does not allow for seamless integration
with the cloud and creates interoperability
issues. More than half (58%) of 300 European
IT leaders cited complexity of their IT environments as the biggest impediment to large-scale
adoption of the cloud, according to a recent
NTT Europe survey.13
•
Cloud management: The key to realizing cloud
computing’s true advantages is to manage
its usage through prudent capacity planning
and monitoring. Non-production teams must
carefully plan infrastructure requirements in
advance and turn off cloud resources as soon
as the job is complete; otherwise, costs will
escalate, making the cloud much more expensive than on-premises labs.
One way to overcome this is to employ
software tools such as Cloudyn, Cloudability
Significant Challenges by Cloud Maturity
% of Respondents
50%
25%
0%
Cloud Beginners
Security
Cloud Explorers
Governance/Control
Integration with private cloud
Compliance
Lack of expertise
Cloud-Focused
Integration with internal systems
Managing multiple clouds
Source: “RightScale State of the Cloud Report,” 2013
Note:
“Cloud Beginners” are new to cloud computing and seek experience to determine its use in future projects.
“Cloud Explorers” already have multiple projects and applications in the cloud and are focused on expanding their
cloud usage.
“Cloud-Focused” are heavy users of cloud infrastructure and are looking to optimize cloud operations and
cloud costs.
Response base: 625 business executives
Figure 2
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7. and Newvem to monitor and manage costs.
The tools provide usage and cost analytics and
allow custom report creation based on metrics
such as time, project, application, etc. They
provide daily updates and alerts on possible
budget overruns to reduce unwanted surprises
late in the process.
Fear of vendor lock-in is another worrisome
issue. Moving to a new cloud vendor is not
an easy process, as a lack of standardization
results in poor interoperability among cloud
vendors.14
Embracing Cloud
The aforementioned challenges, however,
should not deter organizations from exploring
cloud. That’s because in many cases, existing
IT environments have outlived their useful life.
As organizations spend more time using cloud
computing, they will better understand and
experience the benefits and report fewer
challenges, according to a recent RightScale
survey15 (see Figure 2, previous page).
Organizations can overcome all of these
challenges through proper capacity planning,
carefully choosing vendors and working closely
with them, while establishing processes and
controls to monitor and manage cloud usage.
Those fearing security and other risks associated
with the public cloud can build a private cloud and
gain more control, but that requires huge capital
expenditures and large-scale adoption to provide
a cost advantage.16
Many organizations have started their journey
by moving non-production projects to the cloud
to reap immediate benefits while giving themselves time to explore other cloud capabilities.
Public cloud provides immediate benefits to organizations. Working with an experienced partner
that thoroughly understands the business and
technological challenges and has an established
industry track record offering managed services
can provide a smooth transition to the cloud.
As cloud computing matures and standards are
established, more organizations will consider
using it for non-production activities. By then,
smart organizations will have progressed to
utilizing the cloud to enable more cost-effective
and innovative ways of working.
Footnotes
“Enterprise Application Development MarketPulse,” IDG for Delphix, October 2012,
http://www.delphix.com/2012/10/cio-survey-reveals-it-leaders-struggle-to-meet-big-demand-forenterprise-app-testing-development-and-rollouts-next-year/.
1
2
“Codebases,” Information Is Beautiful, October 30, 2013,
http://www.informationisbeautiful.net/visualizations/million-lines-of-code/.
3
“Gartner Executive Program Survey of More Than 2,000 CIOs Shows Digital Technologies Are
Top Priorities in 2013,” Gartner, January 16, 2013,
http://www.gartner.com/newsroom/id/2304615.
4
“Getting Private Cloud? Better Change Your Funding Model,” By the Bell, September 25, 2012,
http://bythebell.com/2012/09/getting-private-cloud-better-change-your-funding-model.html.
5
“TechInsights Report: Cloud Succeeds. Now What?” CA Technologies, May 2013,
http://www.ca.com/us/~/media/Files/whitepapers/techinsights-report-cloud-succeeds.pdf.
6
“How Cloud Accelerates Development and Delivery of In-car Software,” ZDnet, Sept. 5, 2013,
http://www.electric-cloud.com/pdf/EC-CS_panasonic.pdf.
7
“The Cloud Behind the Connected Car: A Case Study on Cloud-Based Software Development,”
Electric Cloud, 2012,
http://www.zdnet.com/how-cloud-accelerates-development-and-delivery-of-in-car-software-7000020263/.
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7

8. 8
Ibid.
9
“How Cloud Accelerates Development and Delivery of In-car Software,” ZDnet, Sept. 5, 2013,
http://www.electric-cloud.com/pdf/EC-CS_panasonic.pdf.
10
“By Using Cloud Platforms, Developers Reduce Development Time by Nearly 15%,” Evans Data Corp.,
January 9, 2013,
http://www.evansdata.com/press/viewRelease.php?pressID=196.
11
“Testing in the Cloud,” Software Magazine, July 2013,
http://www.softwaremag.com/content/ContentCT.asp?P=3516.
12
“Downtime Report: Top Ten Outages in 2013,” Neverfail, Dec. 19, 2013,
http://www.neverfailgroup.com/blog/announcements/downtime-report-top-ten-outages-in-2013/.
13
“Growing Pains In The Cloud,” NTT Communications, 2013,
http://www.eu.ntt.com/fileadmin/NTT-Europe/media/PDF/Research_Reports/NTT_Research_Report_
Growing_Pains_In_The_Cloud_FINAL.pdf.
14
“The Big Lesson Cloud Computing Needs To Learn From The History Of The Web,” ZDNet.com,
June 27, 2013,
http://www.zdnet.com/the-big-lesson-cloud-computing-needs-to-learn-from-the-history-of-theweb-7000017343/.
15
“RightScale State Of The Cloud Report 2013,” RightScale, March 2013,
http://www.rightscale.com/pdf/rightscale-state-of-the-cloud-report-2013.pdf.
16
“Put Your Test Lab In Cloud,” InformationWeek, 2012,
http://www.informationweek.com/services/hosted-applications/put-your-test-lab-in-thecloud/232700441?ct=1022&pgno=1.
References
•
“The Cloud Behind the Connected Car: Cloud-Based Software Development at Panasonic
Automotive,” BrightTalk, Aug. 29, 2013,
https://www.brighttalk.com/webcast/7695/83777.
•
“Three Ways to Move Application Development to the Cloud,” Oracle Corp., 2013,
http://www.oracle.com/us/solutions/cloud/application-development-cloud-1945542.pdf.
•
“Building Your Dev & Test Cloud,” Microland & Eucalyptus, 2013,
http://www.eucalyptus.com/sites/all/files/wp-eucalyptus-microland-build-dev-test-cloud.pdf.
•
“Cloud Computing: The Good, the Bad – and the Beautiful,” PhoenixNap, 2013,
http://www.valleytalk.org/wp-content/uploads/2013/03/AST-0079699_PNAP_Cloud_WP_1.22.13.pdf.
•
“Delivering Large-Scale IT Projects on Time, on Budget and on Value,” McKinsey, 2012,
http://www.mckinsey.com/insights/business_technology/delivering_large-scale_it_projects_on_
time_on_budget_and_on_value.
•
“A Modernized Software Environment for Developing, Deploying and Operating Cloud Applications,”
VMware, 2012,
http://www.vmware.com/files/pdf/Modernizing_App_Develpment_Whitepaper.pdf.
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9. Credits
Author and Analyst
Vinaya Kumar Mylavarapu, Cognizant Research Center
Subject Matter Experts
Saravanan Kumar, Associate Director, Integrated Services Leader
Design
Harleen Bhatia, Creative Director
Suresh Satyavarapu, Designer
About Cognizant
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