In business systems, particularly those that are customer facing, the expectation is that quick is good. Your customers continue to move online for the consumption of media, getting the latest news, making bookings, and purchase gifts and everyday items. These customers increasingly expect the same from your business. The expectation is that where customer facing systems perform well your customers are happy and will recommend your business to others.

One of our largest clients has recently gone through the process of migrating upwards of 60 million client documents from an old Stellent enterprise document management system to the newer Oracle Universal Content Management (UCM) system.

For years we've dealt with IT professionals and organisations who have responded to software performance issues by purchasing more servers. Today that same thinking leads many to assume that performance issues with cloud hosted applications can easily be resolved with the elastic scalability of capacity. So it is natural to ask, does cloud solve performance issues and as such 'does cloud eliminate the need for performance testing?'

In the previous posts in this series we covered the Performance risks with Microsoft Exchange and then Performance testing Microsoft Exchange using Jetstress and Load Generator.

For most organisations Microsoft Exchange is a cornerstone business application. It provides key, critical communications both within the organisation and to the outside world. With increased mobile access, the criticality of this application continues to grow. Exchange is also becoming a de-facto content / contact store for vital information within organisations.