The Need for ALM in the Cloud

As application development in the cloud continues to gain a foothold in the enterprise, it’s becoming clear that IT organizations are going to have to take a more structured approach to application lifecycle management (ALM).

Most IT organizations don’t have a structured set of processes in place when it comes to ALM. But it is clear that many of them want to take advantage of the economics of cloud computing in the context of application development. After all, investing in dedicated hardware to support the application development process probably doesn’t make a whole lot of sense for most IT organizations.

What that means, says Dave Locke, worldwide marketing manager for IBM Rational Software, is that IT organizations that want to develop applications in the cloud need to think through governance and security issues along with how they will automate the deployment of applications that are built in the cloud.

As noted during a recent webinar that can be viewed here, there are a lot of potential pitfalls when it comes to managing the actual application development process in the cloud.

Locke says that one thing that IBM has learned above all about supporting application development in the cloud is that the shift to the cloud tends to shine a spotlight on flawed management processes. As such, Locke highly recommends that customers review their end-to-end ALM strategy as part of any shift to the cloud.

After all, developing applications in the cloud could be just adding another layer of complexity to an already chaotic process unless the right series of controls are in place from the very beginning.