It has been a volatile start to 2020 and IT departments are providing increased services while using fewer resources. As organisations strive to provide uninterrupted services and maintain business continuity, many are looking to the cloud for critical functions such as load testing. As the world moves toward the ‘new normal’, Mohammed Arafat, Director of Pre-Sales, Emerging Markets – Micro Focus, tells us how the company is working to ensure customers have the tools they need to succeed.
To say that the first quarter of 2020 has been challenging for small to medium-sized businesses would be an understatement. Amid a global pandemic, enterprises have been obligated to not only move entire workforces to work from home but also on a much tighter budget and with an uncertain financial future.
On the other side of the IT coin, preventative measures like load testing are more important now than ever before. With more users, bigger workloads and more demands are brought on by remote workers and customers.
Therefore, core applications, computing power and network load balancers are being stretched to their limits. As the increased remote access and functionality demands continue to grow into the ‘new normal’, the situation seems ripe for business continuity disruption.
With heavier loads and limited budgets, organisations with online services such as retail, government public services, banking and telecommunication may struggle to meet performance expectations in terms of speed, scalability and end-user satisfaction.
Many performance issues can be attributed to flawed network architecture but identifying and fixing such a problem is often costly and time-consuming. A network failure could mean the difference between Business Continuity and an unplanned shutdown.
With this twin problem of shrinking budgets and growing network loads, savvy businesses are turning to the cloud to address both issues. Cloud-based load testing creates real-world scenarios by generating loads from global cloud regions to emulate real networks during load tests.
Experts agree that businesses need to remain agile to scale up productivity and efficiency.
According to Gartner’s latest performance testing report: ‘Application leaders must reduce technical debt and mitigate application performance risks. They should adopt a combined ‘shift left’ and ‘shift right’ performance engineering approach to build a highly productive software development organisation.’
At the end of last year, Micro Focus released a cloud-based load testing service, LoadRunner Cloud. LoadRunner Cloud enables businesses to plan easily, run and scale testing in the cloud, without adding undue stress to existing architectures. LoadRunner Cloud can scale load testing to more than five million virtual user tests and create hundreds of load generators on-demand in over 20 cloud regions around the world.
As more and more employees and customers are working remotely due to the spread of COVID-19, ensuring the scalability of your internal and external apps is critical to handle the unprecedented influx of online traffic.
Micro Focus is here to help by making it easier for you to identify any performance issues that may arise and ultimately ensure continuity of service. To enable you to find defects and pinpoint root-cause in real-time quickly, we will immediately provide you free-of-charge LoadRunner Family product licenses until July 31, 2020.
As businesses push to survive and even expand and thrive during these times, we want to ensure that everyone has access to the tools they need for Business Continuity. Micro Focus is committed to supporting businesses during this incredibly difficult period.
Cloud-based hosting saves both time and money, allowing businesses to continue scaling up without the money drain of expanding their architecture. Moving load testing to the cloud simplifies infrastructure management, installation and configuration, and removes the need for the management and maintenance infrastructure such as controllers or load generators.
LoadRunner Cloud allows users to take load testing one step further with predictive analytics that highlight anomalies and problems in real-time. Its extensive reporting capabilities means that not only will existing issues be addressed, but potential stumbling blocks that may crop up with scaling up or supporting higher loads can proactively be addressed before they happen.
These days it is crucial that the IT department shifts its efforts to focus on Business Continuity to maintain business processes even through the toughest of times. Simply put, cloud-based applications like LoadRunner Cloud allows organisations to do more with less and prepare for a possibly uncertain future.
The business has inarguably changed and companies that hope to scale up need to prepare to meet demands in this new reality. To maintain and scale-up services without breaking the budget, cloud-based services like LoadRunner for Cloud will inevitably be the future.
Click here for more information on Micro Focus LoadRunner Cloud and the entire LoadRunner family.
For more information on Micro Focus Business Continuity Solutions and trials visit: https://www.microfocus.com/en-us/businesscontinuity/covid-19
