What is that one nightmare which every industry across the globe is scared of?
Undoubtedly; Cyber Threat!
That’s the biggest challenge of this generation. Gone are the days of invasions, this is the age of Cyber Wars. It takes few seconds for an individual to break into your vulnerable servers sitting somewhere in one corner of the world, seven seas away!
The other day I was chatting to an elderly lady in the train. She said that though she doesn’t understand what ransomware attack is, it isn’t something she has seen in her days. It’s a concern for millions of people reading the newspaper every day globally. The fact that Windows XP is being used in departments like NHS, MET Police, and even defence (HMS Aircraft Carrier), raises eyebrows as everyone is worried about the confidential data held on these servers.
Advancement in technology leads to its own side effects. With untraceable crypto-currencies like Monero in the boom, there is now more motivation for hackers in the darknet market to exploit security loop holes. In view of recent ransomware attacks, every company big or small in any domain (be it health care, defence, banking, cloud computing or social networking) is at a greater risk of cyber threat than ever before. This threat is multiple times higher if your apps are running on old unsupported platforms. So, what’s the solution?
- Can these servers be cut off from the network completely?
- Is it practically feasible to rewrite thousands of apps to move to newer secure Operating Systems?
- Can Microsoft start supporting older unsupported Operating Systems like XP?
None of those are practically implementable without heavy loss of productivity and years of rework.
Luckily I know that latest technology can solve this exact problem. Having worked as an application virtualization developer, I can confidently say that these apps could be migrated to newer, more secure and supported operating systems without any code changes. That’s our daily job at Cloudhouse. I’ve been working as part of the team virtualizing hundreds of legacy apps over recent years.
Cloudhouse containers not just solve compatibility issues for legacy apps to make them run on latest safer Windows and XenApp infrastructure, but also provide extra wrapper of security with features like network isolation and related features; thus providing them a safe haven to leverage latest security patches released by Microsoft.
Watch this space for more upcoming solutions on securing legacy apps as we gear up to fight this global threat.
Priya Saxena
No comments:
Post a Comment