Displaying items by tag: legacy cybersecurity

Cybersecurity in the government has certainly come into focus recently as we have witnessed sensitive document troves exposed on WikiLeaks along access to government information from transaction systems. Perhaps the most serious of the latter was the 2015 incident in which the Federal Human Resources database was hacked for more than 22 million records containing sensitive personal information such as Social Security numbers. In this incident the source of the problem was 30-year-old mainframe software written in COBOL that was too technically obsolete to encrypt personal information. This raised the discussion of legacy system security to a new level.

Code modernization has become increasingly important as we move toward integrated cloud-based and virtualized software environments. Modernization of code permits legacy applications to continue functioning efficiently and securely without a complete rewrite. This makes it possible to meet the demands of today's infrastructure requirements without high cost or compromises in security or functionality. Companies need to expand services, access improved processes and use resources more efficiently. This demands architectural changes. Bringing these trends together, containerization under Docker has created a new model for application deployment that provides numerous advantages to program operation and interoperability, but requires special accommodation.