Delphix has issued the findings of the "State of Test Data Management" study which revealed improved data quality is a major factor in faster application development. The report also showed that, in hopes of delivering more data to more teams across the organisation, that many IT organisations admit compromising data quality. It was also widely felt by respondents that the ability to bring high-quality software to market quickly was critical to survival in today's Software Economy.
A study on the "State of Test Data Management" has revealed that, while organisations have adopted agile and DevOps methodologies to support innovation, it is Test Data Management (TDM) that is prohibitively slow and can significantly constrain application development times. The research, based on responses from 225 business leaders, revealed:
- On average, it takes 3.5 days and four people to provision an environment for testing and development purposes;
- Data privacy is often compromised to support demands for data access across the organisation;
- 75% of respondents admitted that engineers are often allowed access to unprotected sensitive information.
"Application development teams need fast and reliable test data for their projects. Yet many are constrained by the speed, quality, security, and costs of moving data across environments," explained Iain Chidgey, VP of Sales International at Delphix. "Since it takes significant time and effort to move and manage data, developer environments can take days or weeks to provision. In turn, this places a strain on operations teams and creates time sinks, ultimately slowing down the pace of application delivery."
The study shows that while TDM was once viewed as a back-office function, in many organisations it has now matured and sits alongside cloud, DevOps, and other IT initiatives within these organisations. TDM has emerged as a critical business enabler for enterprise agility, security, and cost efficiency supporting measurable outcomes including faster releases (30%), fewer software defects (15%), and adherence to data privacy laws and regulations (100%).
Of all respondents, nearly half (45%) reported taking steps to improve TDM, and a further 43% are confident that their organisation will take steps to improve TDM in the next 12 months. Businesses are increasingly looking to develop automated, self-service strategies that allow developers to bookmark, reset, archive, and share copies of masked data for software development.
"Driven by an increased focus on application uptime, faster time-to-market, and lower costs, organisations have started to move towards a new set of strategies for TDM," concluded Chidgey. "Increasingly organisations are making it a priority to introduce processes and systems that reduce the time it takes to deliver high-fidelity test data and anonymise information without sacrificing speed."
