Auto tech firm assesses cloud readiness of apps 5x faster with CAST Highlight

CAST Highlight enabled the firm to assess the cloud readiness of their application portfolio five times faster than handling it wholly in house.

Challenge

The auto tech firm’s CIO and CTO decided to embark on a massive cloud migration initiative with a goal of retiring 54 data centers within nine months. They have over 200 software products representing an overall portfolio of 3,000-plus apps hosted across their data centers.

Many apps were developed using legacy technology stacks that were experiencing resiliency and security issues while incurring significant cost to maintain.

Furthermore, the apps were running on aging hardware and several of the data center contracts were set to expire by the end of the year.

Solution

Hearing the client’s aggressive plan, their cloud platform provider recommended using CAST Highlight to rapidly assess the cloud readiness of each app and develop a detailed technical roadmap to migrate each to the cloud.

The initial plan was to refactor most of the legacy code and adopt PaaS services once migrated to the cloud.

But once the app assessment process began, the CIO realized this approach would take much longer than nine months. He decided to use automated outputs from CAST Highlight to start by containerizing the apps, enabling a faster move to cloud within the desired timeframe.

Results

The client compared the time it took to manually assess a few well understood apps with CAST Highlight’s automated approach; the latter was five times faster with the same accuracy.

CAST Highlight analyzed all 134 apps in under two days and produced insights including the cloud readiness of each app, specific blockers that needed to be remediated within the code of each app, and recommendations on cloud services that each app could adopt once migrated.

Within five weeks, the client containerized 40 of their apps and developed a plan to complete the process for the rest of the portfolio.