A multinational biotech company approached Brendata with a difficult problem. One of their existing SaaS products was designed to be installed on the Red Hat Enterprise Linux 5 operating system which had reached its end-of-life date and was therefore at risk of falling behind the latest security patches.
In addition, the application was written in an older version of Perl and used many libraries which were deprecated or no longer maintained.
Brendata accepted the challenge to correct the problem and following a careful audit of the system configuration, RPM packages and the application’s codebase, made the decision to install the application on Red Hat Enterprise Linux 8. This maximised the duration for which Red Hat support would be available for the operating system. Likewise, the most recent stable version of Perl was selected and installed.
Brendata updated the application code to work with Perl v5.26.3 and found replacement libraries to provide equivalent functionality to those now deprecated. The code was modified to use these new libraries and tested. We worked closely with the customer to ensure compatibility and output correctness. The application produces a considerable amount of graphical and textual output and in fact, thanks to rendering improvements in the new libraries, the output was more legible than that from the original system.
To further enhance the security of the system, Brendata hardened the security configuration on the system to meet or exceed the CIS level 1 standard, including making further modifications to the application code to meet the criteria of CIS1.
Under Brendata’s care, the system was able to continue operating securely and generating revenue for the customer with full Red Hat support.