It's challenging in today's business environment to grow a business; to increase sales, drive-up market share, bring new products to market and outperform your competitors.

Invariably businesses require system or application changes to support their growth initiatives. To maximise return-on-investment, it is imperative that these enhancements are delivered swiftly and in the most cost-effective manner.

It is also vitally important that these are quality enhancements that fully meet the business requirements and that have been tested thoroughly. Any application bugs or outages that make it into a production release can drastically affect the customer's perception of a business and its ability to service them.

The amount of testing and the quality of the tests performed on an enhancement before it reaches production are now critical.

Furthermore, the cost to rectify a defect rises dramatically the later in the SDLC it is discovered; for example it is estimated that it is 40x more expensive to fix a defect at the user-acceptance testing phase of the SDLC rather than at the design phase. Whilst simply performing more testing is no guarantee that a quality application will be the end-result, more testing will provide a greater level of confidence in how the enhancement will behave. More testing = greater level of confidence.

However, as applications become ever-more complex and inter-dependent, delivering quality enhancements in a cost-effective and timely manner is a unenviable juggling act.

Grid-tools solution streamlines the application testing process. Grid-tools provides comprehensive test data management capabilities for creating realistic, right-sized test databases, protecting data privacy in vulnerable development and testing environments and validating test results.

You eliminate costly cloning processes and correct defects early in the development process – where they are cheapest and easiest to fix. Most importantly, Grid-tools scales to meet your development and testing requirements, across applications, databases, operating systems and hardware platforms.