John Bailey, Logicalis Solutions

Enhanced cyber resilience solutions

Businesses are re-examining traditional applications to make them more portable across environments, says John Bailey of Logicalis Solutions
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John Bailey, Logicalis Solutions

25 November 2021

In association with Logicalis Solutions

Keeping legacy systems up to date in a world of increasing cyber threat has been all the more prevalent throughout the pandemic. As our second year of life under Covid-19 fast approaches, many organisations are still struggling to ensure their new and legacy systems are secure. 

Legacy systems, software programs that have remained in use in an organisation for several years, are often not integrated with other solutions that a business uses. With digital transformation, businesses have had to re-examine those traditional applications, and whether they need to be adapted or transformed.

Modernising applications

“Most companies are at a place now where they may have bought off-the-shelf applications from ISV’s and are now using DevOps to tailor or tweak existing applications,” says John Bailey, enterprise division sales manager at Logicalis Solutions. “They can modernise applications to make them more portable across environments. For example, something that worked on premise could be given the flexibility to run from a cloud environment.”

“Carrying that heritage forward can be challenging for companies as they may still need the services, but they might need to adapt them into microservices. To develop secure containerisation, they must ensure activity within a microservice remains within a locked grid and cannot be compromised.”

Total confidence

Businesses must ensure security is built around these services: “A business may be driving DevOps to have fast, agile, processes that can produce new results and microservices quickly. But this needs to be balanced by an understanding of how that service can be delivered in a secure fashion by ensuring the correct processes and procedures and code protection is there throughout. There must be one-hundred percent confidence that no one has intercepted the code on its journey.”

Changing needs

As our security needs are constantly shifting, Bailey says a business needs to create a continuously evolving environment that will be hostile to an attacker. “You can’t sit back and be confident that a cryptographic strategy you defined three years ago is still valid. There needs to be a constant process of devising and revising what you’ve done in order to confuse attackers of your defences, and how to overcome them.”

A business’s ability to adapt to change can be determined by its security approach, explains Bailey: “Some businesses have a security strategy that’s like a jigsaw puzzle. They may have created a fantastic security picture, but if one element changes, it’s quite difficult to modify a jigsaw piece to create another picture that’s up to date. Whereas if you go for a more modular approach, like Lego, it means certain bricks can easily be swapped out and brought up to date.”

IBM

“IBM is at the forefront of both ends of the spectrum,” says Bailey. “It has a handle on everything that is heritage or legacy. It still provides the most secure physical platforms in the marketplace today and is the closest to being able to ensure the journey forward is mapped out clearly for its customers.”

With the acquisition of Red Hat, IBM can offer enhanced solutions like secure containerisation. “It is conscious that customers want to adapt and modify their applications,” continues Bailey. “IBM is at the front end of being able to counter the threats that are coming from future challenges. It is equipping all of its heritage systems with tools like Quantum Safe, which may not be of significant concern today, but certainly will be in the next five years.”

A business must constantly refine its processes to keep up with the accelerating pace of attacks. “Whatever you’re doing, you need to be able to constantly refine your processes,” says Bailey. “As time moves forward, the sophistication and the speed of attack will undoubtedly increase. Your ability to structure your program for defence needs to equally remain at that fitness level to prevent being overwhelmed. Even large organisations find this challenging to undertake on their own. At Logicalis Solutions, we can help customers maintain those standards as necessary.”

To learn more about security offerings available from Logicalis and IBM, e-mail ibm@ie.logicalis.com


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