Embrace the cloud. Don’t embrace the cloud. There are so many different opinions on adopting cloud technologies that it can be hard to keep everything together. If you’re trying to make decisions for your organization or contribute to the decision making process, it’s about time that you looked a little closer at how cloud computing affects quality management as a whole.
Are there benefits to adopting the cloud for quality control and assurance? Absolutely. With cloud computing technology, you have multiple options in terms of your adoption. You can go with software as a service, platform as a service, or infrastructure as a service — SaaS, PaaS, and IaaS respectively.
Even though you get scalability with cloud computing, you also get some risks that you need to address early on. For example, if you’re migrating your applications into a cloud structure, failure can be very costly. The production environment needs to be kept stable to the best of the company’s ability. While failure would impact quality assurance, it’s not as high risk as other areas of cloud usage.
Integration for SaaS and PaaS packages may take time, but it’s reasonably straightforward to implement cloud technology for quality assurance purposes. This is a technology that’s been around for a while, with plenty of successful case studies. If you have the task of presenting the merits of cloud computing to a specific organizational committee, make sure that you’re taking the time to point this part out.
The maturity of cloud computing is incredibly high, making it a perfect candidate for implementation within your division.
Looking for a way to reduce the time to market? Cloud computing can play a factor in this. You can swap out testing environments faster in the cloud than if you had to maintain all of those different technologies yourself.
It can be difficult at first to determine which cloud model you want to go with for the tasks most important to you. Go over the benefits and objectives that you have for the ongoing project. Be aware that this will require a significant financial and time investment combined. Even though cloud computing is designed to make life easier in the world of quality management, that doesn’t mean that you’re going to get every advantage right away. Be sure that you keep special documentation of the implementation on hand. If there are any mistakes, it’ll be easier to pinpoint where things went sour.
