Virtual Environments Testing as a Cloud Service: A Methodology for Protecting and Securing Virtual Infrastructures

Abstract

Testing is a vital component of the system development life cycle. As information systems infrastructure move from native computing to cloud-based and virtualized platforms, it becomes necessary to evaluate their effectiveness to ensure completion of organizational goals. However, the complexity and scale of virtualized environments make this process difficult. Additionally, inherited and novel issues further complicate this process, while relatively high costs can be constraining. Enabling service-driven environments to provide this evaluation is therefore beneficial for both providers and users. No such complete service offering currently exists. This paper is therefore aimed to benefit industry and academia involved in areas involved with cloud-based testing of virtualized software and its environments. A review of current literature highlights a number of challenges in the domain. An analysis of the challenges aided in deriving requirements for developing a servitization framework for virtual infrastructure testing as a service. It is anticipated that this framework can further feedback into developing solutions to the aforementioned challenges. An evaluation of a real-world organization's servitization requirements case scenario indicates that the proposed framework provides potential solutions for associated use cases.

Keywords

• Testing
• servitization
• virtual environment
• utility computing
• cloud computing
• security