CAST Highlight Gives Enterprises a Kick in the Apps

Posted By Jonathan Bloom on May 25, 2011 | CAST News, Software Analysis

System outages, software failures, security breaches and IT maintenance costs are all rapidly on the rise. It seems like not a day goes by that we don’t read about one company or another announcing that their system went down or revealed personal data to hackers. Couple that with published estimates of technical debt at a half-billion dollars globally and $1 million per company and you see that things are getting out of hand. The sad part about it is it doesn’t have to be that way.

Most of these outages, breaches and rising maintenance costs can be traced back to structural issues in the application software. Were enterprises to perform some measure of due diligence to find and shore up these structural flaws, their occurrences could conceivably drop significantly. For many of these enterprises, though, the question that has plagued them has been one of trying to justify spending the money to find the 100 lines of code in the average 400K-line app – that’s 0.025% or one-fourth of one-tenth of one percent – that hold the potential for some form of risk. And that’s taking for granted that IT execs know about all of the applications in their systems; many of them are “flying blind” in this respect.

As of today, there is a better way!

This morning, CAST launched CAST Highlight, the industry’s first comprehensive, cloud-based SaaS solution that rapidly provides IT leaders with a snapshot of any or all the company’s applications.  It performs automated analysis and measurement of software in seconds and does not require code to be uploaded to the cloud – averting a major security concern! It then provides feedback on software health and arms executives with the information they need to determine which applications need further investigation or closer ongoing monitoring for structural issues.

The best part is that this fast snapshot of a company’s software health — which comes is a result of CAST’s acquisition of software from the European space agency, EADS, combined with the company’s own 20 plus years of experience performing analysis and measurement of application software — will cost enterprises only a few pennies per line of code.

At that price, there’s no reason why enterprises shouldn’t give themselves a big “kick in the apps” to locate the issues that could lead to failures. Meanwhile, CIO’s who don’t perform structural analysis of their software deserve a swift kick somewhere else.

Tags: Application Quality, automated analysis and measurement, CAST, cloud computing, Project Management, Security, Software, Software Development, structural quality, Technical debt