Application Development and Testing
Application development and testing consumes large quantities of your data center resources. The need for compute resources fluctuates throughout your application development lifecycle – for example, when 100 servers are needed for two weeks to load-test a new application, or when developers in multiple sites need servers for initial prototyping. You typically plan for these surges by provisioning for peak usage. The result: during downtime in the lifecycle, this expensive equipment sits idle in your data center. But under-provisioning is not an option, since the applications that are being built and tested, such as CRM, ERP and custom external-facing applications, are important to your business operations.
Moving this application development and testing lifecycle to the cloud lets you:
- Provision your data center with only the resources needed for your steady-state operations, saving you substantial capex and moving non-production environments out of your production resources
- Provide your development and QA organizations with the flexibility to “turn on” capacity when they need it
- Maintain control over cloud usage and ensure enterprise security policies remain in effect
CloudSwitch makes it easy to use the cloud for application development. Not only does CloudSwitch allow your developers to build and test applications in the cloud as if they were in the data center, but with CloudSwitch it’s also easy to bring the applications back INTO the data center as you go into production. You have the control you need throughout the development process, with the capacity and flexibility you need so your data center resources are not impacted.
A large pharmaceutical company was being constrained by the 3-6 month fulfillment time required by corporate IT to provision new Linux and Windows application environments. The company identified the need to increase responsiveness to the development groups’ evolving needs as a strategic initiative, and decided to establish a cloud-based delivery model. With CloudSwitch, administrators are now able to securely extend the internal development network to include the cloud, using standard IT-approved images and without disruption to existing processes. Example application components they can now extend to the cloud include web servers, application servers, and database servers used for prototyping, performance testing, functional validation and pre-production qualification.
