This is part one of a two part paper on the testing and monitoring of cloud-based applications. While the general principles are similar to those used for more traditional software, there are significant differences caused by the tendency of cloud-based applications to increase and reduce their instances.

Every company, irrespective of its size or location, has loads of computing activities to undertake in order to maintain its business operations. This can include but are not limited to data entry, data processing, storage and retrieval. In more complex circumstances, it could involve data transmission, communication, customer/client services management, centralization of IT systems and network administration.

With cloud computing approaching maturity and companies beginning to get serious mileage out of the technology, government began to get involved to see if there were efficiencies and benefits they could tap. A research paper estimates that the big data market in Japan could reach 1,000 billion Yen by 2020 and lead to smart cities that minimize waste and improve efficiency.

For many years there was stability in the database segment of the IT industry. Relational Database Management Systems (RDBMS) such as Oracle, SQL Server and MySQL (to name a few) had proven themselves to be capable of handling vast amounts of data and that seemed to be all that modern businesses required.

Cloud Computing News Highlights: Increased spending on cloud applications, SMB’s strong adopters of cloud, CloudTP events, Air Force moves to the cloud, Tukey for managing big data, Long term cloud costs lower, Ubuntu Cloud Summit

Organizations want to efficiently manage the unexpected surge of data as more companies are moving their business processes to the cloud.

The IT world has responded to the needs of the market as PaaS and Big Data-related start-ups have started to emerge.

Cloud Computing News Highlights: Hubspan Predictions, Mobile Cloud Connections, Healthcare Cloud Problems, Salesforce radian6 Social Marketing Cloud, NIST Cloud Roadmap

Healthcare industry adoption of cloud computing continues to grow as amounts of data and storage needs increases.

Forrester Research: Big Data is where the biggest breakthroughs in cloud computing will come from and where individual markets will find their next big winners.