We Are Running On Legacy Systems!

I’ve seen Microsoft Windows evolve from Version 1 — yes, there was a version 1 and it was terrible — to Version 11, and, under the hood, Microsoft need to make sure that most of their systems are compatible with previous ones. Along the way, we’ve seen some major leaps forward, such as with Microsoft Windows 3.1, Microsoft Windows XP and Microsoft Windows NT. These, though, have left a major legacy issue and which often lacks the strong use of encryption, digital signing and in distributed approaches.

The Microsoft approach, too, has often been to centralise things, and which means that they can often fail when these central sources of information are breached. This centralisation is actually a core part of their success with Active Directory. But the move to the Cloud can expose serious risks that, at one time, could be covered by on-premise systems.

Like it or not, we are running many of our systems on old versions of Windows, and which have changed little in the general architecture over the past few decades. Someone travelling in a time machine would not see much difference in the Active Directory infrastructure that was available at the end of the 20th Century. The one significant change is the move from on-premise Active Directory towards a Cloud-based one. But, all the weaknesses of single points of failure and attack are still there, and without…