Since the onset of COVID-19, organizations scrambled to adjust their work environment to accommodate the sudden shift to a remote and distributed workforce. As a result of this new paradigm, labs and testing teams face ongoing pressure to maximize speed and productivity, while at the same time keeping CAPEX in check. This technical overview will address the challenges for lab and testing environments that have grown increasingly impactful:
- IT/Network Admin Challenges: Users, including test engineers, and members of development, support, and sales teams, require access to shared lab infrastructure. But their requests often overburden IT admins, whose onsite staff are short-handed due to pandemic-related restrictions
- User Challenges: As a result, users are growing increasingly frustrated with strained access to lab infrastructure, which causes delays and leads to compromised workarounds and Shadow IT-- accessing the topology via unsecure or unauthorized methods
- Business Challenges: Delayed development and testing lead to delayed product releases; to increase network availability, organizations are forced to purchase additional infrastructure
