Enov8
Comprehensive Test Environment Management

Today, effective test environment management (TEM) has become a critical prerequisite for any IT company to avoid project delays, IT overspends, and substandard testing quality. However, combating TEM-related challenges efficiently is no easy feat and can be rather perplexing to many companies. One such company, a large global banking organization, was faced with a similar ordeal and was losing around 20 million per annum from an ROI perspective due to test environment management (TEM) inefficiencies. They were bogged down with the lengthy process of preparing test environments, which invariably impacted the testing quality and resulted in project delays. Needless to say, due to this mismanagement, they were also over-spending on infrastructure licensing and servicing and overall day-to-day IT operations supporting that footprint. They also failed to control their non-production environments more proactively and effectively. In conjunction with this, the data compliance issues in non-production also needed to be addressed, as non-compliance to personal information entails a fine of 4 percent of revenues as per GDPR, which translates to millions of dollars for large companies. For the organization, the ideal way to navigate these challenges was clear—partner with experts who are perfectly poised to address the issues and can ensure that the test environments are properly understood, managed, and fit for usage by the relevant software development teams. Enter Enov8—a software engineering house specializing in test environments, releases, and test data management.

In order to promote real-time visibility into test environments, enable effective decision-making, and improve analysis, the company implemented its “object-oriented” rapid application development (RAD) platform, EcoSystem. As one of the world’s leading IT Enterprise Intelligence platform, this extensible engine works as an information aggregator and a holistic orchestrator. It comes with a “No Code Lean Synthetics” framework that allows companies to determine their test systems’ health and analyze the underlying component services, assisting even ‘mature’ (automated) organizations in gaining a significant ROI. “We stepped in, analyzed the problems, and introduced our platform to help uplift the various capabilities across the test environment management spectrum,” explains Niall Crawford, CTO at Enov8. “By deploying our solution, we addressed all their issues around ROI, compliance, and infrastructure licensing and servicing, and reduced the deployment time from days to minutes,” he adds.

Founded in 2014, Enov8 is a spin-off of an Australian consulting company, TL Consulting Group, which specialized in helping large organizations enhance their technical testing capabilities around test environments, test data management, performance engineering, security, and test automation. Enov8’s goal is to provide organizations with its “platform of insights and control” to make the difficult aspects of DevTest operations easier. The platform’s key benefits involve better understanding and modeling of test environments, data, and centrally planning and coordinating test environments and test data operations, including releases. It also includes automating difficult tasks such as test environment shakedown and provisioning, and data securitization. This ultimately provides real-time visibility of environments, data, and their underlying operations across the software development life cycle. “For software testing to be effective, organizations need to effectively tackle the environment and data problem. We are well-positioned to rise to these requirements with our end-to-end fully integrated solution,” asserts Crawford.

According to Crawford, although most organizations invest heavily in their configuration management database (CMDB), it’s often too production and component centric and captures information at the hardware level, which is not particularly useful for developers and testers. Enov8, on the other hand, adopts a slightly different approach to modeling test environments from the perspective of the software development life cycle.

For software testing to be effective, organizations need to effectively tackle the environment and data problem. We are well-positioned to rise to these requirements with our end-to-end fully integrated solution

It allows Enov8’s clients to better understand where a resource or system fits in the life cycle and how it relates to other systems. This enables them to create IT and business solutions on the surface and model the underlying deployment tiers, including applications, data, and infrastructure. Crawford quips, “We like to describe the Enov8 platform as CMDB on steroids. It’s very much about taking a traditional CMDB and extending its capabilities so that clients can see a universe of different perspectives which the IT and software development community understand.”

Once this base model of understanding is in place, Enov8 then associates these systems or resources with other environments and system information, such as events, operations, run sheets, and automations. Enov8’s platform can bring it all together to provide a more holistic and useful view rather than a traditional CMDB view. The company has built its platform to be very much modular, which provides a set of guard rails for different types of test environments and test data activities, that can be used together or in isolation. The platform’s functionality is not limited to test environments modeling; it also offers test environment booking, plotting in coordination, calendaring, operations such as run sheets, and standard operating procedures, alongside deployment and management capabilities. Besides, with a focus on data compliance and test data management, Enov8’s platform offers automated “PMV” (Profiling, Masking, and Validation), data mining, and a DataOps (DevOps) library for central management and orchestration of client’s data operations. It offers numerous reports that provide overarching visibility into information regarding current use and future availability of system instances, events, bookings, support or service requests, and so on. In essence, the different modules of the platform can be used individually or combined, whereby they come together to form a certified universal platform of insights.

Enov8 follows a philosophy of “skills over numbers” and employs industry veterans and technology experts to deliver its solutions. By working as small localized teams, Enov8 is able to simplify collaboration, communication, and team bonding. “If you were to enter the Enov8 office for the first time, you would see a tight group of friends, not a hierarchy, wherein everyone has got everyone’s back. By following this methodology of doing more with less, we can deliver solutions to our clients very quickly and in an enjoyable manner,” Crawford notes.

Steering ahead, Enov8 aims to continue enhancing its existing product portfolio with a focus on immutable objects such as containers and unstructured data. The company also plans on employing machine learning to better automate and simplify the user experience. Moreover, Enov8 has recently released version 1.0 of its new product geared toward data loss prevention. This dovetails with Enov8’s data management product and helps organizations understand their security issues or potential data exposures in the unstructured data space. Enov8 is looking forward to rolling out this product globally in the next few months.