Software scanner uses cloud to highlight risky cloud

Software analysis specialists CAST today claimed businesses could health check their applications from the cloud in a fraction of the time traditional software solutions would take.

The company said porting its tools to the cloud could allow a large enterprise to sweep through its application portfolio in as little as a week, instead of the many months that a more traditional approach might need.

The cloud solution, called Highlight, looks at the quality, health and structure of applications and can achieve its goal in less than a week, rather than months, according to CAST.

Highlight is set to launch on 1 June and combines CAST's existing expertise in software analysis with a lightweight software analysis engine, originally developed for EADS, the European aerospace giant best known for Airbus.

CAST, which acquired the technology behind Highlight earlier this year, said it was capable of analysing, measuring and quickly providing a software quality assessment on large blocks of code.

"This is a fast snapshot of an enterprise's systems that provides IT managers with insight into the complexity, the technical debt and potential risk within their applications," said Lev Lesokhin, CAST's worldwide marketing VP.

"Software outages are on the rise, IT maintenance costs are out of control, and yet CIOs are flying blind' when it comes to the applications that comprise their systems because they don't know much about the software structure and cannot see the potential risks embedded within them."

Lesokhin said users would download a software scanner from the Highlight portal to their systems and point it at the locations for any or all application software they wish to analyse.

It then conducts the assessment locally and creates a text file to upload back to the cloud portal, where project managers and CIOs can examine analytics regarding size and quality.

He added customers could then use CAST's flagship Application Intelligence Platform to perform more granular analysis and measurement on the most risky applications identified by Highlight.