Omnium Lite - Test Environment Management Challenges & Data Security

“Every little helps to ensure that you bank online securely and the system is not most times offline, too slow or not working.”

The process of manufacturing a car will at a high-level typically start with design, then building a prototype, crash testing the prototype which is now written off. Imagine if you had to do that for a few Bugatti’s, think of the cost, that is no pocket change.

“Building & crash testing the prototype car just built must be expensive, just like developing & testing software prototypes.”

Like car manufacturing, developing, and producing software applications like the online banking application, you use to check your balance or transfer money every day can be cumbersome.

So, you build the software prototype on a software development: harness or platform or development environment. Then you copy over the software application prototype to the test: harness or platform or environment, to test and make sure it works properly.

Then if it works properly, you now copy it over to the production: harness or platform or environment, so using a banking software application as an example. At this stage it is now available for registered/authorised customers to log in and check their bank balance etc.

Most enterprise organizations increasingly now rely on digitization to develop, distribute their products or services, and to interact responsively to both existing and prospective customers.

The cycle of building new software applications or features is continuous, requiring many of these development, test, and production environment to underpin the roll out of different digital products to their customers.

These environments collectively also known as IT or Test Environments are expensive company asset or resources, normally hosted in a physical data center or in the cloud by a provider such as AWS EC2 or Microsoft Azure.

The end-to-end process of procuring, building, booking/scheduling, managing, tracking is collectively referred to as Test or IT Environment Management.

With more recent events such as the SolarWinds hack and other similar ones previously that demonstrated extreme data/security vulnerability across most organisations, securing the test, development, production platforms and the customer data that resides on them is now more than ever required at every level.

Omnium Lite – Our DevSecOps Test Environment Management Toolset automates the test environment management function integrating with other DevOps tools to provide an end-to-end function.

It also tracks who is logging in, who has tried to unsuccessfully to log in, patrols its overall environment checking on processes, disk space, all events looking for abnormal behavior or security breaches using Artificial Intelligence/Machine Learning precepts and reporting on it.