Green IT Index launched by CAST to assess inefficient software

CAST, provider of software analysis and measurement technology, has launched the CAST Green IT Index for providing companies technical assistance in identifying wasteful software resources.

With the help of standard software quality rules, CAST can identify below average architectural and coding solutions that dismiss resources and helps to assess the extent to which any application is trouble-free.

Users of the CAST Application Intelligence Platform (AIP) can now opt for installing a Green IT Index to their Application Analytics Dashboard for a quick review into the environmental impacts of the portfolio of concerned application.

As the environmental effect of software has been hard to measure, most of the green IT has been shifted to hardware. With the new Green IT Index, CIOs can now measure the performance of each application makes changes on their carbon footprint and their bottom line. said, Lev Lesokhin, executive vice president of strategy and market development, CAST.

Demonstrated after CAST’s software quality guides including Robustness, Performance, Efficiency, Transferability and Changeability, the CAST Green IT Index is given a number between 1 and 4.

A score of 4 designates that an application follow standard programming rules applied to assess the environmental sustainability of software.

A research conducted on CAST’s Appmarq database of 1,800 enterprise applications found that the average of the total sample of applications analyzed is 2.63, with only 2.5 percent of applications scoring 3.9 or higher. While some of them had no violations, some had over 200,000.

Utilities, government and pharmaceuticals are the three industries that topped the Green IT Index and telecommunications and media had the lowest scores.

Inefficient programming makes wasteful use of hardware resources causing outages. This impacts carbon footprint when it occurs repeatedly. Firms with high Efficiency Health software factors are greener also, said, Olivier Bonsignour, senior vice president of product development, CAST.

Besides, these significant inefficiencies result from large enterprise software with components that interact through various technology layers. With such large applications, it is difficult to assess how the code they modified affects the overall efficiency of the application.

The software’s energy consumption effect changes with hardware, operating system configuration, and programming languages used.

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