Legacy systems are at the heart of many businesses for many reasons, as highlighted in the carousel that we posted earlier this week.
If a system is not properly supported, the consequences can be catastrophic. Examples in recent years include:
2022‑2023 NHS Pathology Services (Synnovis): Attack exploited unpatched, unsupported Windows 2008 servers used for pathology data exchange. This led to 11 000+ patient interactions disrupted, with an estimated £30‑£40 m in remediation costs.
2024 NHS England multiple “major system failures”: A cluster of legacy clinical‑systems (including old Oracle 10g instances) suffered cascading crashes after a security patch was applied incorrectly. This led to 123 major incidents, with staff forced to revert to paper‑based processes and patient care disruptions
2024 Microsoft UK tenant breach (“Midnight Blizzard”): The attack leveraged a legacy, non‑production test tenant that had never been decommissioned, allowing password‑spray attacks to pivot into production.
These situations and the many others could have been prevented. Don’t be the next news headline and statistic. Seek professional support to stay safe and operational.
MSS provides fully managed legacy support, bringing deep expertise without you needing to hire in‑house, supply vetted refurbished hardware & spare parts for legacy systems, comprehensive maintenance contracts that provides secure proactive monitoring, patch management, and rapid incident response for legacy OSes (VMS, OpenVMS, Tru64, Solaris), and strategic migration planning.
If you’d like to learn how we can help you, just contact us at info@microsystem.co.uk.
