A new way to measure software efficiency allows CIOs to focus on the environmental impact of their enterprise software
CAST today launched the CAST Green IT Index to help companies identify wasteful software resources. Applying standard rules of software quality, CAST is able to identify poor architectural and coding practices that are known to dispel resources and provide a measure of the extent to which an application is free of these problems. Users of the CAST Application Intelligence Platform (AIP) now have the option to add a Green IT Index to their Application Analytics Dashboard for instant insight into the environmental effects of their application portfolio.
“To date, much of ‘green IT’ has focused on hardware, because the environmental impact of software has been very hard to measure,†says Lev Lesokhin, CAST’s executive vice president of strategy and market development,
“With the new Green IT Index, CIOs can now for the first time objectively measure how the performance of each application affects their carbon footprint, and ultimately, their bottom line.â€Â
Modeled after CAST’s software quality indices of Robustness, Performance, Efficiency, Transferability and Changeability, the new CAST Green IT Index is expressed as a number between 1 and 4. A score of 4 indicates that an application does not violate any of the standard programming rules CAST applies to evaluate the environmental sustainability of software.
A study conducted on CAST’s Appmarq database of more than 1,800 enterprise applications from around the world found that the average of the entire sample of applications analyzed is 2.63, with only 2.5 percent of applications scoring 3.9 or higher. While some of the analyzed applications had no violations, some had over 200,000. The three industries that topped the Green IT Index are:
1. Utilities
2. Government
3. Pharmaceuticals
The two industries that had the lowest scores were:
1. Telecommunications
2. Media
“Inefficient programming uses hardware resources wastefully, even causing outages. This can impact a firm’s carbon footprint in a significant way, especially when it happens repeatedly,†says Olivier Bonsignour, CAST’s senior vice president of product development.
“Firms and industries with high Robustness and Efficiency Health software factors are also ‘greener’.â€Â
The most significant inefficiencies result from very large enterprise software with components that interact through multiple layers of technology. With such large applications, it is difficult for individual developers to know how the code they modified or introduced affects the overall efficiency and robustness of the application. This lack of visibility to overall software system impact is further exacerbated by the trend of deploying service-oriented architecture, which introduces even more layers of abstraction.
The impact of software’s energy consumption can differ depending on hardware, operating system configuration, and programming languages used. But the overall impact of poor software quality remains, no matter what the situation.[signoff predefined=”Enjoy this?” icon=”icon-users”][/signoff]
