The Cost of Inefficient Test Environment Management

Do you know how much inefficient Test Environment Management is costing you?

One thing that stands out from our discussions with organisations in Asia Pacific, North America and Europe is the distinct lack of awareness when it comes to how much Non Production Environments can cost an organisation.

When it comes to Controlling Test Environment Costs, most organisations still manage their environments inefficiently through the use of manual, error prone and decentralised methods such as spreadsheets, email and shoehorned intranet sites which doesn’t help a large organisation run the day to day operations efficiently, let alone provide any meaningful decision making capability for driving proactive innovation through the organisation.

Now this may not sound like such a big deal when Non-Production is effectively the “ugly step child” of Production right? Well, when you consider some industry statistics the importance of the story starts to show;

• Over 50% of an organisation’s Infrastructure, Licencing and associated Services spend is for Non Production environments;

• 95% of Organisations have no idea what their environments look like;

• 20% of Development and Test cycle productivity is lost due to Test Environment Issues, which leads to the last one;

• The #1 cause of IT project delays, late time to market and release related issues are Non-Production Environments and Test Data;

Speaking from prior experiences while working on a billion dollar transformation programme, each delay cost the programme half a million dollars per day. Test cycles were often delayed by weeks, sometimes months, often due to inefficient Test Environments not being fit for purpose or instability caused by poorly coordinated deployments and change, all managed in spreadsheets and email.

One of the main issues is no one knew what the Non Production environments looked like and you can’t manage what you don’t know.

Other TEM Reading

Interested in reading more about Test Environment Management. Why not start here:

Enov8 Blog: Enterprise IT Environment : What it is and how to define yours?

Enov8 Blog: IT Environments : What they are and which do you need?