voke analyst Theresa Lanowitz and her team recently conducted an independent survey of over 500 participants from both technology and non-technology companies of varying sizes to explore their use of virtual and cloud-based labs and the results they experience.
We conducted an interview with Theresa earlier this year where she detailed how these labs, and the “extreme automation” that can be utilized to quickly set them up and tear them down are resulting in “next generation enterprises” being built around the globe.
Theresa recently hosted a webinar with Skytap where she dug deep into voke’s findings to show just how vital virtual and cloud-based labs are to today’s development, test teams, and enterprises as a whole who are looking to produce software at a higher quality, and faster pace than ever before.
Attendees asked some fantastic questions at the end of the webinar, including:
- I understand the need for on-demand environments, but we were told to just use a generic cloud solution and create our labs on top of it. Will this work just as well an an out-of-the-box cloud lab solution?
- What can we do to make our management understand that this technology works, and will save us time?
- What types of software can be provisioned by virtual and cloud-based labs?
- We always build out physical labs and never have enough time for testing. Will virtual and cloud-based labs help with this?
- What types of technologies are being used or suggested to maintain configuration, so that the test environment matches production?
- You talked about the “shrinking lab problem.” We have this in our organization, but we get around it by scheduling multiple lab sessions—but that means other groups aren’t testing. Is it really feasible to have access to a lab for as long as necessary?
- How do we ensure that the latest code is being provisioned? What is the level of input needed from our technical and development teams?
