CAST Brings Cloud Migration Assessments to Microsoft Visual Studio

Cloud migration assessments are a great way to audit your entire technical environment, making it easier to plan, prepare and execute successful cloud migrations. Conducting an assessment before cloud migration efforts begin gives your team time to hone-in on any characteristics in your applications that need to be changed before the migration in order to reduce complexity and risk of operational disruption. Without a complete cloud migration assessment before starting the cloud migration process, you are opening yourself and your system up to numerous problems that may not be easy to fix down the road.

CAST Offer for Microsoft Visual Studio Enterprise Subscribers

CAST recently launched a new benefit for Microsoft Visual Studio Enterprise subscribers to help with application portfolio analysis prior to cloud migration to Azure. As part of this special offer, CAST Highlight delivers fast, objective assessments of application cloud readiness, health, complexity and technical debt to improve investment and rationalization decisions during the planning and execution stages of cloud migration.



Now, specifically for Azure, Highlight is empowering developers to get ahead of their company’s cloud migration efforts, helping them write secure code for cloud-native applications in a swift and easy manner. Through its predictive pattern analysis, Highlight helps developers build Azure migration roadmaps that consider key factors, such as:

• Blockers – code patterns in applications that slow down migration due to their complexity or security concerns.
• Boosters – code patterns in applications that signal they are ready to be migrated today with low-risk.
• Business Drivers – a collection of technical enablers and process maturity that contributes to overall cloud readiness.

Case Study: SmashFly Sees Cloud Migration Success with CAST Highlight

As part of SmashFly's continued partnership with Microsoft Azure, they needed to quickly understand which applications could benefit from PaaS. SmashFly wanted objective insight into the application health, code complexity and cloud-readiness across their product line to inform a smarter cloud strategy. Moving core applications to Microsoft's Azure PaaS was critical to their growth and expansion plans.

Lacking visibility into the cloud readiness of the 50 applications in their product portfolio, SmashFly used CAST Highlight to perform a rapid scan of all applications. As a result, they were able to quickly gain visibility into application-level blockers that could prevent smooth and rapid migration to the cloud.



Once they had a baseline view of cloud readiness, complexity and health they were armed with the facts needed to build smart refactoring plans and educate their delivery teams about application architectural issues preventing optimal use of Azure.

To accelerate refactoring and remediation efforts, the team wanted a seamless integration within their SDLC. CAST Highlight's integrations and Azure DevOps + GitHub extension helped to embed code-level analytics and cloud-readiness outputs at the developer workstation. The team rescans applications to monitor refactoring progress and ensure overall application health improvements; reduced complexity and technical debt.

For more details about the CAST Highlight special offer for Microsoft Visual Studio Enterprise Subscribers, click here.