David V Glasgow wrote: > I recently finished a fixed term contract working for a pretty IT > savvy NHS Trust. The NHS has been forced by central government to > reallocate IT (and other infrastructure) monies to front line > services. They are also trapped by legacy software with dependencies > on old (and proprietary) Windows systems and software. Now obviously > stupid, but actually historic stupidity which was in the 1990s > disguised as good business and standard practice. > > Not to mention the Clinical Information Systems which look and behave > as if it is still the 1990’s. > > Apart from that, everything is fine.
That's the sad reality of so many security budgets: they don't become adequate until after it's too late.
The dependency on older unsafe software versions is one that's always mystified me. I once worked for a vendor whose clients included several large hospital networks, and one of them required us to deliver our app in a way that would maintain compatibility with IE 6, years after Microsoft warned customers to stop using it.
Subsequent versions of a software are generally supersets of features found in earlier versions, with the only things missing as we go forward being bugs.
When written to spec, it should move forward gracefully. Microsoft has done a better job of maintaining backward compatibility than most.
So if someone writes an app that doesn't work going forward, dependent on things specific to an outdated system, in effect their app is dependent on bugs.
For any org to consider bug-dependent software "mission critical" should raise eyebrows. For a hospital it seems even more serious.
But I understand how budgets tend to gloss over things like this. And this week, even the most reluctant orgs do too.
-- Richard Gaskin Fourth World Systems Software Design and Development for the Desktop, Mobile, and the Web ____________________________________________________________________ ambassa...@fourthworld.com http://www.FourthWorld.com _______________________________________________ use-livecode mailing list use-livecode@lists.runrev.com Please visit this url to subscribe, unsubscribe and manage your subscription preferences: http://lists.runrev.com/mailman/listinfo/use-livecode
