CAST wants to help you with cloud migration

Are you ready to move your business-critical apps to the cloud?

CAST has added a CloudReady Index to its Highlight software-as-a-service (SaaS) platform, aiming to ease the process of cloud migration.

Highlight, at its heart, highlights (clever, eh?) any risks or cost-savings that a company might run into when migrating programmes to the cloud. It was born from the need for CAST's customers to scale their custom-built solutions.

CAST's original software was called AIP (Application Intelligence Platform); this is used to ensure absolute solidity on mission-critical, custom-developed programmes. However, these apps often ran on only a few machines. About five years ago, CAST's customers began getting excited about expanding their applications from less than a dozen PCs to thousands.

A much broader, faster solution than AIP, Highlight "quickly and cheaply" inventories any solution that a business might be using, said Jeff Fraleigh, global head of Highlight.

Cloud service providers have been racing to get clients to migrate their apps to the cloud in recent years, which Fraleigh refers to as "infrastructure as a service" (IaaS). "AWS has done an amazingly good job of that," he told Computing.

However, simply picking up an app and running it on someone else's server is missing the advantage of the cloud: things like big data, the IoT and machine learning. "A newer trend is: step one, move apps to the open cloud; step two, move from infrastructure to application," Fraleigh said. To do this companies need to understand their apps: what's going to break, what can be taken advantage of, and how it can be used in the cloud. "Companies understand the top 10 per cent of apps they use, because they are critical," he said, "but that means that 90 per cent are not understood. That's where Highlight comes in."

The CloudReady Index can tell a user if an application can be easily moved to the cloud. Data is presented as a series of graphs: a small green bubble means that a programme is small and easy to move; a big red bubble presents much more of a problem.

These conclusions are reached in a variety of ways; one of the most interesting aspects of the Index is that it identifies potential delays and shortcuts, based on already-known roadblocks. For example, it will pick out odd user authentication systems that will make an app difficult to run in the cloud, then provide a list of these roadblocks and what needs to be changed. This can be done by a hand but is a very long process, and also introduces human error. Fraleigh said that automating the system has sped it up "from two weeks to ten minutes", and is more thorough.

We asked how these roadblocks were identified. CAST originally had the engine that would scan an app, but not pick out roadblocks; this came from a partnership - still TBA - with "a major cloud service provider," which shared with CAST what it looked for when migrating clients' services to the cloud. This service provider apparently became "very excited" when it saw Highlight.

CAST has run about 15 separate pilots with its service provider partner, and is continually adding data for Highlight to look for. The results have been very encouraging, shortening cloud migration time by between 80 and 90 per cent.

Once the health, risk and cloud-readiness of a client's apps is understood using Highlight, AIP can be used to perform a deep dive on them.

Fraleigh told us that CAST currently works with organisations such as BCG, Accenture and Exelon. The new Index is platform-agnostic and can measure a client's apps against the technical aspects of "any" cloud platform provider.

NDAs are in place that prevent CAST from sharing names of partners using Highlight and its CloudReady Index. However, we did source an anonymous quote from the CIO of a global aeronautics manufacturer, who said:

"We already had information on ‘Why Cloud,' but we lacked concrete information on the ‘What' and the ‘How.' Since using CAST Highlight, we have observed a real acceleration of cloud adoption based on the technical parameters of our application, including how they will run and how much they will cost in IaaS and PaaS environments."

41 per cent of respondents to a Computing survey this year said that 'Integration' was preventing them from moving applications to the cloud. However, we also found that almost two thirds are now storing their data in the public cloud.