Reduce Data Center Cost and Complexity
Most data centers are complex and costly to manage. Centralized IT lab environments typically involve large capital outlays and the cost of implementation and administration is usually five times the initial hardware costs. Additionally, these data centers can't scale to meet use, so most of the time the server will be underutilized. On the other hand, sometimes there will not be enough bandwidth, so during hours of peak demand companies are forced to implement infrastructure rationing among teams.

Cloud services provide comparable data center infrastructure; however, usage is billed hourly, so an organization can easily scale infrastructure to its needs. Also, usage is billed hourly, allowing companies to bypass large upfront capital expenditures and pass savings on to their customers. The resulting costs are typically 30 to 40 percent lower than managing infrastructure in-house.

Enable Global Team Collaboration
The shared virtual infrastructure from cloud computing allows organizations to easily collaborate with team members across the globe. Most IT organizations have relationships with outsourcing service providers, and commonly the teams are in multiple countries and time zones. The resulting distance and time zone differences create operational challenges for these teams. Cloud-based services for test environments enable both teams to work on the same virtual infrastructure. Developers and testers can collaborate on the same virtual machines in real time over the Web to resolve problems. The shared virtual infrastructure simplifies the administration of lab environments and reduces the time associated with issues caused by different environmental and configurations settings.

Accelerate Provisioning Time with Self-Service Model
As labs have a highly dynamic nature, these environments require constant set-up and tear-down of multiple machines and software configurations. With this model, busy labs or infrastructure shortages can lead to long delays in operations. Virtual lab automation solutions provide a self-service web portal so IT operations and QA professionals can deploy environments without involving an IT administrator, which dramatically improves provisioning time and increases productivity.

Increase Software Quality and Predictability
IT managers need to determine the best way to apply limited resources to reduce software defects that could impact software stability and performance. A typical application development team spends up to 50 percent of their time on environment configuration and defect reproduction. By adopting a virtual lab automation solution, this time is dramatically reduced through automation, enabling teams to spend more time on development, test planning and execution and resolving defects, ultimately resulting in better software quality and more predictable delivery schedules.

Reduce Server Sprawl
Server sprawl is a common problem reported by IT administrators, and it describes servers kept under desks or left in lab environments that are usually underutilized and unavailable to the teams that need them. Server sprawl can be mitigated by creating a common pool of virtualized machines and providing several teams with access to the machines, and virtual lab automation helps companies keep virtual machines organized and easy to track. Additionally, virtual machines can be set to suspend after a period of time, saving costs and reducing infrastructure usage when virtual machines are left on.

Test Impact of Production Changes Prior to Creation
Due to the low utilization and high cost of maintaining a second environment, it is generally uncommon for IT organizations to have a pre-production environment in which to test software updates. Also, maintaining static pre-production environments for applications is not cost effective and replacing network settings is very difficult.

A virtual lab environment enables IT operations and test teams to create pre-production environments and ‘check' them into a configuration library. When a change needs to be tested, an IT professional or tester can deploy the environment into the virtual lab, ensure network settings are replicated by using network fencing, and test updates before rolling into production. As soon as the test is complete, the virtual infrastructure is released back to the shared pool for other users. This enables patches, software updates and application changes to be safely and thoroughly tested before releasing to production environments.

Allows IT Teams to Focus on Production Uptime
Infrastructure provisioning is approximately 20 percent of the IT footprint and 80 percent of the work. The dynamic nature of development and QA, IT ops testing, training and demo lab environments requires that IT operations teams are frequently tasked with provisioning as well as set-up and tear-down work which is often manually intensive and time consuming. Adopting a cloud service for virtual lab automation frees up IT operations teams to focus on production systems rather than spending cycles on lab environments.

Reduces Time to Replicate and Resolve Software Issues
Outside of the cloud, testers report software defects and developers spend hours trying to diagnose the defect, but are often unable to reproduce the problem, and the bug is usually left unresolved for too long. A virtual lab enables an entire multi-machine system to be suspended to the point of failure so testers and developers can work together to diagnose the defect. The "suspended snapshot" capabilities of the virtual lab enable developers and testers to save hours of unnecessary time resolving software defects.

Conclusion
Adopting cloud computing is a smart move for any IT organization. Just as Software-as-a-Service vendors offer a low-risk, high ROI alternative to in-house applications, cloud service for virtual lab automation offers similar benefits. Once IT departments begin experiencing the benefits of the cloud and demonstrating immediate cost savings, increased productivity and improved responsiveness to the business, upper level management will be more receptive to incorporating the cloud infrastructure into their company's overall IT strategy.