Developer operations allow businesses to deploy new software applications faster than ever, which is great — except when the new apps and underlying compute infrastructure fight like rabid dogs.

“If you’re developing these applications with DevOps on the front end, and you’re dropping new versions of them in hours rather than quarters, the infrastructure on the back end has to kind of speed up,” said Tom Joyce (pictured), chief executive officer of Pensa Inc.

A similar problem crops up when upgrading security software, Joyce pointed out. Emerging from stealth this week, Pensa Inc. is attacking both issues with a software-as-a-service product that accelerates application and software testing in virtualized environments.

Joyce recently spoke with John Furrier (@furrier), host of theCUBE, SiliconANGLE Media’s mobile livestreaming studio, at theCUBE’s Palo Alto studio in California.

At his old gig at the Quest Software business unit at Dell Technologies Inc., Joyce experienced this quandary first hand. “We weren’t comfortable with upgrading our software, because we couldn’t validate that it worked,” he said. The company would spin up cloud-based resources in their demo environments to test upgrades, Joyce explained.

The price of upgrade-loafing

Pensa’s SaaS solution is superior to ordinary cloud-testing in terms of lower cost and commitment, according to Joyce. Customers can use it as much or as little as they want. It also offers intelligent automation that checks compatibility with underlying infrastructure quickly.

Pensa users can spin up test environments with VMware Inc. software, OpenStack, DevOps software, security, etc. They can then validate that their new apps or upgrades work with their infrastructure and go ahead and deploy them without fear.

The price of such fear — particularly in the area of security upgrades —  can be disastrously high, Joyce explained. For instance, in the highly-publicized Equifax data breach,

“That was exactly that scenario. If they had made those changes and put them into their environment, they wouldn’t be on the front page of every newspaper in the world,” Joyce concluded.

Watch the complete interview below:

Photo: SiliconANGLE