Capgemini in its Annual World Quality Report said 42% of companies plan to increase their budget allocation for application quality assurance (QA) and testing as most organisations recognise that their application portfolios are in need of rationalisation.
They also realised that mission-critical applications implemented using outdated technology must be revised and updated to increase efficiency.
The 3rd annual report said the percentage of companies that are moving at least some of their IT systems to the cloud has grown to 81%, as they seek to adopt agile delivery methods as part of their application quality assurance.
The need for stringent testing and QA is fuelled by the emergence of new technologies such as cloud-based services, as application security becomes vital for ensuring quality and mitigating risk.
According to the report, emerging economies are investing more in quality assurance with 83% of Chinese companies and 56% of Brazilian companies substantially increased their QA investment in 2010.
An increase on focus on quality assurance across Australian organisations has also been witnessed over the past year, with 37% of survey respondents indicating that their testing budgets had gone up.
Increasingly, investment in QA is focused on promoting efficiency and standardization, often through creating testing centres of excellence to centralise and consolidate QA practices, particularly in emerging market companies.
The report revealed that emerging economies are also the fastest adopters of cloud infrastructure, as over a third of Chinese companies (37%) plan to migrate between 11 and 25% of their applications to the cloud in the next year with a further 40% making arrangements to host between 26 and 50%.
Contrary to this, 24% of companies in the North America and 18% of Western and Northern European companies indicate they still have no interest in migrating their applications to the cloud, the report said.
In the security front, over a quarter (27%) of large organisations (5,000+ employees), are putting in place dedicated information security teams to design and test security procedures and requirements to protect confidential and sensitive information from unauthorised users.
Testing in the cloud means a new generation of testers will need to manage the entire portfolio of IT services rather than just verifying the quality of individual systems.
Capgemini vice president of Global Channels and Partners Executive Raf Howery said, migrating high quality applications to the cloud is a natural progression as it offers a cost effective, reliable and agile arena to create and test them in.
"Further investment in QA, especially in developed markets, will help ensure companies can flourish in the cloud once the technology is fully adopted," Howery said.
Over two thirds (70%) of respondents employ contractors or third party vendors for quality assurance. Preference for outsourcing continues to be co-location (27%) followed by near-shore locations within a company’s country or continent (24%).
For companies based in the US and Canada, the next choice is often India (18%), followed by China (12%), and Eastern Europe (9%) while for the first time, Western and Northern European companies have indicated they prefer to outsource QA to Eastern Europe (12%) or China (7%) over India (4%).
