Market demand for mobile app development services is expected to grow at least five times faster than internal IT organizations’ capacity to deliver by 2017, according to Gartner. As a result, enterprises must use the most efficient, effective and secure methods possible for their mobile app development processes, including mobile app testing.
Today’s users expect the highest quality user experience from their mobile applications, so testing should be a top priority for enterprise IT departments that want to keep up with these expectations. Mobile testing is more complex than legacy application testing, however, because of the myriad platforms, networks, OSes and devices on which the applications run. To ensure their mobile apps perform reliably for every user, businesses must test on key variations of this growing universe of mobile devices.
Sharing a single large pool of mobile devices across large or geographically distributed testing teams creates a number of challenges that risk bleeding IT and QA testing budgets dry. Mobile device access management has been plagued with inefficiency and risk, requiring IT teams to purchase an unreasonable number of devices to cover their enterprise’s growing needs. Inevitably, many of these devices remain unused or become lost, which can stall testing and result in idle mobile engineers.
In addition to the cost and inefficiencies of having multiple mobile devices, security has become a top concern for today’s enterprises, thanks to the rise in data breaches. To avoid complications, enterprises must hold mobile testing practices to the highest security standards. A data breach during app testing can create significant cost for an enterprise and harm its reputation. Plus, for industries that must adhere to Sarbanes-Oxley, HIPAA or other federal privacy regulations, a data breach or unauthorized user access can create a regulatory compliance issue.
The Mobile Device Cloud Option
A mobile device cloud may be the answer to the cost, security and compliance issues enterprises face in their mobile app testing environment. It can serve developers looking to test and debug applications and QA teams performing manual or automated testing, and facilitates collaboration among these groups and other stakeholders such as marketing and customer support.
A mobile device cloud offers organizations four significant benefits: security, accessibility, speed and cost. Let’s explore each in a bit more detail:
Security
On-premises, private mobile device clouds access a centrally managed pool of devices and mobile apps and enable testing within an enterprise’s corporate infrastructure and behind the firewall. This creates a highly secure environment for proprietary apps and sensitive data throughout the testing process, which is managed in-house. In addition, private, cloud-based mobile testing can improve compliance with regulatory standards by reducing the chances of a data breach or unauthorized user access.
Accessibility
Private mobile device clouds can still meet the enterprise need for global access—developers, testers and mobile engineers can securely access centrally managed mobile devices from locations anywhere across the globe without compromising corporate data security.
Speed
Technology advancements in mobile application testing platforms now allow automated, continuous testing simultaneously on multiple devices. This allows private mobile device clouds to be even more effective in increasing an enterprise’s app testing speed and quality without compromising security.
Cost
With IT budgets for QA and testing increasing 9 percent over just the last year, reaching 35 percent of enterprise IT team’s total budget in 2015 according to Capgemini’s “World Quality Report 2015,” IT teams need affordable options that still maintain efficiency, effectiveness and security. Private mobile device clouds often are much more cost-effective than off-premises, public device clouds, while also providing an agile, efficient and effective solution.
BI Intelligence predicts that mobile phone sales will surpass 2 billion in 2016, which means demand for enterprise applications will continue to increase rapidly. More enterprises already have begun using on-premises, private mobile device clouds and are seeing the benefits of this secure, agile, affordable option for their mobile application QA needs.
For those enterprises that haven’t yet considered private mobile device clouds, 2016 is a great opportunity to upgrade your mobile testing with an improved solution and to meet both employees’ and customers’ high expectations for enterprise mobile user experience.
