“We're not short of capability,” she explained to us, “we're weighed down by our own past.” Legacy workflows persist, old assumptions guide decisions, and “the way we've always done it” shapes strategy. In a market transformed by real-time data and automation, these habits quietly erode competitiveness.
COBOL, short for Common Business-Oriented Language, is the most widely adopted computer language in history. Of the 300 billion lines of code that had been written by the year 2000, 80 percent of them were in COBOL. It's still in widespread use and supports a large number of government systems, such as motor vehicle records and unemployment insurance; on any given day, it can handle something on the order of 3 trillion dollars' worth of financial transactions.
In an effort to transform this portfolio, the agency is launching a challenge to gather ideas from industry on how to move these old systems to cloud-native architectures and reduce its technical debt. According to a Tuesday notice on Sam.gov, the agency is forgoing a traditional acquisition in favor of a challenge-based approach. The multi-phase competition will allow the FAA to watch vendors perform, not just pitch.
A newly identified Linux botnet is relying on decade-and-a-half-old exploits and techniques, cybersecurity company Flare reports. Dubbed SSHStalker, the botnet uses multiple 2009-era tools and mechanics, including an Internet Relay Chat (IRC) bot and 19 Linux kernel exploits. According to Flare, the botnet is rather noisy, executing a cron job every minute for persistence and using a watchdog 'update' relaunch model, and deploying various scanners and malware on the infected machines.
A mid-sized fintech company with 150 engineers rolled out AI coding assistants in early 2025. The productivity gains on greenfield projects hit 40%-better than the vendor's optimistic projections. Engineers building new microservices from scratch reported that AI pair programming felt like having a competent junior developer working alongside them, handling boilerplate, suggesting tests, catching edge cases before they became bugs.
Remember the springtime of 2025, when the federal government and the state of California forced everyone to get a new driver's license called Real ID because the previous version of your driver's license was not considered secure enough? State and federal officials assured us that the new Real ID was going to stamp out identity fraud and improve verification, because these new Real IDs were so much more reliable from an information security standpoint.
Let's be honest: most agencies don't have a blank check to invest in cybersecurity modernization. But that doesn't mean they're stuck. You don't need a full rip-and-replace to make meaningful progress; you need clarity, urgency and smart prioritization. Whether you're working with a full budget or a shoestring one, there are moves you can make today that will strengthen your defenses tomorrow.
It's Thursday afternoon in 2025. You're setting up a booth at a Realtor appreciation event, maybe your third one this year. You paid $2,500 for the table. Dozens of agents drift by. Three stop. One takes a koozie without even looking up. By six o'clock you're loading candy and koozies back into your car and calling it brand awareness. You'll do it again next quarter.
Fragmented and stop-start technology investment has resulted in the police being slow to adopt new technologies - and benefit from the expected productivity improvements - at a national level, according to a report from the National Audit Office (NAO). The UK's independent public spending watchdog said that in the financial year 2024-25, His Majesty's Treasury provided £234 million over four years to help fund investments in police technology, including £55.5 million in that year.
In an era where AI is driving innovation and efficiency, marketing organizations are grappling with a persistent challenge - data silos and disconnected data. These issues hinder the ability of AI to deliver accurate insights and seamless user experiences. Understanding the roots of this data dilemma is crucial, as it not only impacts data quality but also reflects broader organizational dynamics.
According to some estimates, tech debt, or the costs incurred when having to constantly fix aging or clunky software systems, has ballooned to more than $1.52 trillion in the U.S. alone. With technology like agentic AI being heavily embedded on top of companies' aging technology systems and operations, this rising cost of tech debt makes sense. Many organizations are quickly implementing new technologies without addressing underlying systems first.
Warehouse floors once revolved around static, siloed systems that did what they could with what they had. But logistics today is an entirely different game. Fulfilment timelines are tighter, customer expectations are higher, and product complexity is increasing. Against this backdrop, outdated systems become bottlenecks. That's why warehouse management software is undergoing a transformation-from on-premises legacy tools to scalable, cloud-based platforms.
"Transportation Secretary Sean Duffy told employees in an email Tuesday that the department is launching a consolidation initiative, dubbed 1DoT, to "streamline our processes, consolidate administrative functions and modernize our infrastructure to better serve the American public."
The challenge was substantial: modernize and streamline agent-related data by migrating from aging legacy systems to more scalable and accessible platforms.
Cloudflare's 1.1.1.1 Resolver service became unavailable to the internet starting at 21:52 UTC and ending at 22:54 UTC. The majority of 1.1.1.1 users globally were affected. For many users, not being able to resolve names using the 1.1.1.1 Resolver meant that basically all Internet services were unavailable.
In many insurance transformation initiatives, every team begins by modeling the interface, which involves writing stories for forms, APIs, or dashboards. Legacy systems don't behave on the interface level, though. They act at the process level.
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