Information Security and Clout Testing Challenges

Cloud Testing Challenges
Cloud testing techniques are still in its infancy stage, there are several challenges associated as below (Jain & Malhotra, 2013; Gopalakrishnan, Prakash & Ramadoss, May 2012):
Cloud Service Model: With a variety of service models and having clients from multiple domains makes it very arduous for test team to engender an optimal test matrix. For each service model, subscriber has access to different set of system components and hence has different use cases for testing availability, security, and performance. For example, in case of SaaS, CSP is responsible for performance experienced by end user whereas in PaaS, CSP is responsible only for environment and infrastructure performance. Also different business domains have different risks and hence different acceptance matrix e.g. for a medical company data security is major concern, for a travel agency service availability is major concern.
Security challenges: Information Security takes a whole new dimension when it goes out of the customer’s in-house location and becomes a part of external domain space shared with multiple customers. As cloud supports multi-tenancy, the test team needs to do an extensive set of security testing to make sure data is secured not only from internet attack but also from other customers sharing same cloud. Data security needs to address aspects like data access, storage, retention, and integrity policies. This can be done by performing data access and multi privilege testing, that challenge is how to simulate test environment where any change in other customer load can change the result. Performing multiple tenants’ scenario is helpful to make sure there is no loophole. Along with Multi-tenancy testing other testing’s also req...

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...challenging for a tester to determine impact of an updated interface on other interfaces and integrated system. This testing can be handled by performing backward interface compatibility testing. Again, automated testing of regression cases is great help in successfully testing the changes.
Frequent release of feature rich application: SaaS provider frequently releases feature rich application to compete with market requirements. To make sure new feature releases application is communicating properly with other interfaces and all functionality are working properly tester need to perform end to end testing. Performing end to end testing is tedious and challenging task. This challenge can be handed by creating an automated test library to test SaaS application upgrades. The tests should measure impact to functional as well as non-functional aspects of application.