Regardless of an organization’s industry or size, virtually every critical business activity or service is at least partly reliant upon network connectivity. When network performance slows or issues arise that halt critical end-user services, it can be very costly to an organization. Lost employee productivity, eroded customer loyalty, and reduced sales can all be among the ramifications for even relatively brief service interruptions.

Software testing has been an established discipline as old as software development itself. We have seen significant evolution of testing practices recently specially driven by Continuous Delivery and DevOps, where testing is increasingly integrated with agile development and other software lifecycle practices.

Staring down the runway of 2023 and toward 2024, I’m wondering what will become of the digital transformation initiatives that began pre-Covid and accelerated over the past two-plus years. We’re certainly not entering a “stop transforming” period. So, what will transformation look like going forward?

Within enterprises, it used to be that applications ran on a single server. Owners could directly monitor that discrete machine, conveniently access all the logs they needed, see all the metrics that mattered, and hit the reboot button, without needing to confer with “everyone.” Those days are gone. Modern application architectures stretch the definitions of the words “federated” and “distributed.” We now have distributed applications.

Systems for managing electronic health records (EHRs), clinical decision support, claims and payments, operations, and more are advancing rapidly in the healthcare industry. A more complex and dynamic mix of internal and external networks now play an integral role in patient outcomes. Digital transformation in healthcare is swiftly moving from islands of data to interconnected hybrid environments through critical apps like Epic Systems.

It is not always possible or necessary for an organization to rely solely on cloud resources. For example, requirements might call for on-premises infrastructure for privacy reasons. Alternatively, some organizations might use both on-premises infrastructure and public cloud services provided by companies like AWS, Azure, or Google.