Displaying items by tag: security

TriGeo Network Security, Inc. awarded a sole-source contract to TSRI for documentation and Refactoring of TriGeo’s primary product offering. This "Roundtripping" process involves taking in a client's code, applying pattern-based refactorings to change and improve the code without changing the functional equivalency of the application.

Microservices: The Architecture that Runs the Cloud

In past decades, software applications for organizations and enterprises were built as single systems designed to fulfill multiple business needs. These applications are often referred to as monolithic due to their enormous size and cumbersome nature. In a monolithic structure, all functionalities rely upon one another, making them very difficult to update or maintain—making changes in one area can create unknown failures in others. Additionally, maintenance and upgrades can be a very heavy burden not just for the system administrators, but for the business as a whole. Entire areas within the organization are often offline for hours or even days as administrators hold their breath to make sure the new/upgraded applications don’t break something else.

One of the most important architectural advances since the rise of cloud computing is microservices. Though not necessarily tiny in size, microservices offer an alternative by breaking down monolithic applications into multiple, single-purpose services that interoperate with—rather than depend on—each other. These decoupled services are highly flexible, scalable, reliable, and can run simultaneously across multiple applications.

Microservices also make processes more efficient. They have the ability to communicate with one another to make a complete system and enable teams to use agile software development practices to deliver constant, ongoing software releases rather than forcing administrators to rely on single time-intensive upgrades.

From a business perspective, microservices can fulfill customer and employee requirements on an as-needed basis to provide new services and functionality. Their efficiency often means faster time to market on new products and services, and since they can be developed independently, organizations experience reduced risk with minimal business disruption.
 

Preparing to Move to a Microservices Environment

When considering modernizing monolithic applications and making the move to a cloud-based microservice architecture, you must first assess, tune, and optimize your applications for a successful  effort. Consider these items when preparing for a modernization of your legacy mainframe systems to bring them up to par with today’s architectures and languages:

• Know your systems.
• In order to successfully modernize, understanding your existing systems is key. Obtain documentation and a detailed blueprint of your current architecture.
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• Assess the appropriate target language.
• Microservices can be written in many different modern computing languages. Your business and operational needs can help drive this decision.
   
• Understand your data model.
  How will your data interact with the microservices you build or employ, and how do you ensure that you do the appropriate due diligence to protect your own data as well as your customers’?
   
• Decide on cloud vs. on-premises (private cloud) deployment.
  While cloud infrastructure becomes more secure by the day, if your systems are highly classified or include sensitive personal information, you may want to modernize to a private cloud that still allows you to employ microservices.
   
• Additional considerations – automation and refactoring.

While there are many different approaches to software modernization, the most accurate, efficient, and cost-effective option is a fully automated solution. Automation provides significant advantages over manual enhancements, not the least of which is a huge reduction in risk due to the introduction of human error to the modernized application.

A fully automated modernization includes a key component known as architectural refactoring. With refactoring, the application is re-engineered to improve the modernized system’s architecture, user interface, and maintainability. This iterative process also includes the removal of dead and redundant code while improving the quality and effectiveness through each pass. The refactoring process retains the functional equivalency of the original application while making the system more flexible, microservice compatible, and ready for cloud deployment.
 

Getting Across the Finish Line to Microservices and the Cloud

Modernizing your monolithic applications to microservices and the cloud is no easy feat. It will take a team of experts to not only focus on the tactical modernization of the software, but also work closely with you to put your organization on the path to success. This means working to understand your existing architecture with an assessment and documentation, developing a roadmap to your target language and architecture, and finally, getting you across the finish line with a fully modernized and improved application that’s ready for microservices and the cloud. This start-to-finish partner will be an invaluable ally in your efforts.

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TSRI is Here for You

As a leading provider of software modernization services, TSRI enables technology readiness for the cloud and other modern architecture environments. We bring software applications into the future quickly, accurately, and efficiently with low risk and minimal business disruption, accomplishing in months what would otherwise take years.

Get started on your modernization journey today!

Mainframes are big. Mainframes are powerful. Mainframes continue to run an enormous number of critical applications. Even as today’s enterprise infrastructures gravitate toward the cloud and newer languages, according to Allied Market Research, the market for mainframes will continue to grow through at least 2025 and legacy languages such as COBOL are still in wide use. The actual amount of processing performed by mainframes continues to grow steadily each year as a result of increasing demands, more users, and new applications reliant upon data stored on mainframes.

Modernize Now, Plan for the Future

While the capacity and processing power of a mainframe remains attractive to enterprise companies and governments alike, there are drawbacks: when it comes to agility, mainframes cannot quickly adjust to the needs of a business. They cannot quickly scale to meet extraordinary events. It’s difficult to integrate business-intelligence tools for non-engineers to easily access the data they need. Mainframes often don’t have the automated security tools to mitigate a security breach before it causes extensive damage.

At the same time, as each year passes, more experts that can maintain the older, legacy languages like COBOL and PL/1 are retiring. In the wake of the Covid-19 pandemic, the availability of programmers reached crisis proportions when overtaxed unemployment systems in some U.S. states couldn’t keep up with demand. Most younger software engineers train and work in newer, evolving languages that support web technologies and the cloud.

Still, even as many of these enterprise organizations are strongly considering moving operations and processes to the cloud, such migrations can take years, and they may not abandon their mainframes entirely. But they still need the agility, access, and security of a modern system to remain competitive.

So, what can these organizations do? They can modernize.

A modernization effort is often targeted not only at the mainframe itself, but at older language programs that run these massive machines. These programs, often written in now-archaic languages without consideration for internet connectivity or cloud computing, often need to change to meet the organization’s current needs for accessibility, customer experience, and security compliance. These requirements are universal to modernization efforts of any kind, but not all forms of modernization are adept at meeting all the requirements. The modernization strategy your organization selects needs to consider the resources you have available, your timelines, and what your ideal outcome looks like.

Choosing a Modernization Strategy

Mainframe modernization does not have to mean eliminating the mainframe. Organizations can utilize a number of different modernization strategies that meet different demands at varying cost and risk levels. Some possibilities include:

1. Gradual integration: On an as-needed basis, organizations can use automation to modernize older applications through incremental improvement and build new applications on the mainframe that fit into a state-of-the-art computing environment.
2. Retire, Retain, Replace, Rehost or Re-envision: An organization will assess legacy applications and systems on an individual basis and decide what should be retained, what can be rewritten, and what should be replaced with a new, modern application that can be hosted in a new environment such as the cloud.
3. Lift and shift: Rebuild current mainframe applications on a new platform, then integrate the with mainframe applications and data sources across platforms.
4. Automated Transformation:  A dedicated team assesses existing applications created in common languages such as COBOL or Fortran, or even less-common languages like PL/1 and MUMPS, then uses automated processes to translate the legacy application to the desired modern language (e.g., Java is a very common target). Organizations can then migrate to an upgraded mainframe or rehost them in the cloud. At the same time, a wider range of programmers can work with the modernized applications and more easily incorporate them into new databases and services.

Each approach varies depending upon business requirements, budget, and modernization schedule. Regardless, before beginning any process, an organization’s business and technical teams need to define their objectives and scope.

Gain Security & Competitive Advantage

Whether your organization is ready to move out of a mainframe environment or not, modernized code provides the security and peace of mind that your critical applications can be maintained and evolved as needed to support the business over time. As the Covid crisis and associated economic pressures have forced businesses of every size to accelerate modernizing their legacy systems, organization leaders have realized they can no longer wait to maintain their security and competitive advantage.

While some organizations may choose to do a wholesale migration, most companies and government agencies will opt to modernize using a more gradual approach. Either way – and whether an organization stays on their mainframe, moves to the cloud, or develops a hybrid solution – a modernization will ensure they can have the digital and human resources to sustain their operations far into the future.

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TSRI is Here for You

As a leading provider of software modernization services, TSRI enables technology readiness for the cloud and other modern architecture environments. We bring software applications into the future quickly, accurately, and efficiently with low risk and minimal business disruption, accomplishing in months what would otherwise take years.

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Get started on your modernization journey today!

The recent successful and attempted attacks on critical government legacy information systems at the Office of Personal Management and the IRS have provided a stark reminder of just how vulnerable these older systems are. Commercial systems are not immune to criminal and foreign agencies either, and in fact, may have more to lose in the near term in lost revenue, IP theft, negative branding, and the scandals lingering often for years. Sony, Anthem, Banner Health, Home Depot and many others can testify to this fact.