Today, IBM (NYSE: IBM) and CAST, provider of software intelligence for digital leaders, announced new capabilities in CAST Highlight – the software intelligence product for rapid application analysis – to help enterprises transform and accelerate IBM Cloud adoption. Continuing its longstanding work with IBM to help organizations modernize applications and adopt a hybrid cloud approach, the new CAST Highlight capabilities include automated recommendations for IBM Cloud offerings.
Application modernization is one of the biggest challenges faced by enterprise IT departments, especially as organizations turn to hybrid cloud strategies and need to seamlessly run applications across several different platforms. When migrating critical workloads to the cloud, it becomes essential to rapidly pinpoint areas where application code needs to be changed, estimate precisely the effort required and identify services that are best suited for the applications to leverage. CAST Highlight now automatically recommends the IBM Cloud native services best suited for each application, based on its technical characteristics. For example, when CAST Highlight detects that an application is performing manipulation of persistent files, the IBM Cloud Object Storage service is recommended, along with the relevant documentation for deploying the service.
“CAST Highlight can analyze the source code of hundreds of applications in a week and automatically detect patterns that may impact the migration, whether one intends to use containers or embark on refactoring. It also specifies exactly where and how delays can be addressed,” said Marc Zablit, EVP CAST Business Development. “By optimizing the migration process, organizations can more quickly experience the unique benefits of IBM Cloud, including its leading security capabilities.”
IBM Cloud is designed with features to address security, compliance and resiliency demands of today’s enterprises. By hosting workloads on IBM Cloud, enterprises can use IBM Cloud’s confidential computing capabilities delivered with IBM Hyper Protect Crypto Services and backed by the highest level of security certification commercially available[1] to protect mission-critical workloads. This can allow businesses to retain control of their own encryption keys, meaning clients are the only ones who can control access to their data, not even IBM can access.
IBM Global Business Services multi-disciplinary experts use CAST Highlight as part of the IBM Garage Methodology designed to help clients fast track and derisk the modernization of applications and co-create solutions.
“CAST technology has been an integral part of the IBM Garage for over a year, helping enterprises on their hybrid cloud journeys,” said Hillery Hunter, VP and CTO, IBM Cloud. “With the new CAST Highlight capabilities, organizations can accelerate their migrations to cloud and experience the benefits of IBM Cloud earlier, including its industry-leading confidential computing capabilities.”
CAST is part of IBM’s partner ecosystem, an initiative to support partners of all types — whether they build on, service or resell IBM technologies and platforms — to help clients manage and modernize workloads with Red Hat OpenShift for cloud environments, including IBM Cloud. Red Hat OpenShift is the industry’s leading enterprise Kubernetes platform. IBM Cloud is the industry’s most secure and open public cloud for business. With its security leadership, enterprise-grade capabilities and support for open source technologies, IBM Cloud is designed to differentiate and extend on hybrid cloud capabilities for enterprise workloads.
The new capabilities to help organizations migrate mission-critical applications to IBM Cloud faster are now generally available at castsoftware.com/highlight.
