Have You Contemplated a Virtual Lab for Your Software Development Needs?

A great many small- to medium-sized companies with IT requirements resort to many different complicated, expensive, and time-consuming solutions so that they can create an enterprise applications environment for development, testing, QA, migration, demos, IT training and other preproduction demands. Not only does it need investment in servers as well as other hardware, software licenses, and IT resources to create and manage the environment, but developing and testing programs in prelaunch can be demanding if various members within the team are not all working in the same office and increased even further if they are not situated in the same physical location. There are obvious expenses incurred in purchasing servers and also other hardware, software and licenses - in addition to the need for more manpower in order to create and maintain the working environment. The situation becomes further complicated when some of the members of the development team are not in the same location and collaborating gets to be more difficult.


These challenges are especially a nuisance to small and medium sized firms, who don’t have the depth of resources to build parallel virtual labs for their product development endeavors.


Virtual labs can help mitigate the problems and expenditure of establishing and collaborating on development and test environments. A cloud-based virtual enterprise environment will enable developers, solution integrators and IT team members to establish the required environment easily and rapidly, without the need of IT investment of any kind. And of course if the different computer software they need is preinstalled on the server with all the current appropriate operating systems, as is the case with some cloud sharing solutions, all the better. All these environments may be used for any sort of software development project, and have been shown to be especially advantageous for developers working on complicated enterprise IT tasks, like Business Objects, Microsoft SharePoint® and SAP® ERP.


The fact that there is no need for a physical, parallel development and test platform ensures that developers can swiftly and simply create and test their solutions, without having to wait for IT to build servers and software. A further advantage is that the solution allows extremely straightforward migration to production after tests and approval. Irrespective of where your team is located they will have full use of the server so that they can QA the software that has been designed or set up a new virtual environment.


The necessity to handle multiple servers, VPN’s, firewalls and travel are simply no longer a concern. Whatever is needed is readily available in the cloud environment and can be reached via a Web browser, anytime, anyplace. It is centrally handled and supervised to make sure of version consistency and integrity.


The virtual lab is created with workflow layers to make the virtual environment easy to transfer. Drag-and-drop features help to make everything uncomplicated to build.


Every member of the team will be able to simultaneously build, test, QC and run demonstrations of the enterprise programs using individual clones of the environment - which is as simple to share as sending an email or a link - or everyone could collaborate in the exact same environment in real-time. It has never before been so simple and efficient to move the preproduction environment over to a production server.


If you are searching for a development and testing environment then visit http://www.cloudshare.com and take our free trial.