This case study highlights AIM Consulting’s recent work successfully resolving significant compliance vulnerabilities and technical debt for a client’s inherited application.
Faced with an outdated system burdened by unsupported technologies and lacking documentation, AIM Consulting quickly transformed the application into a compliant and stable enterprise solution.
Case Study Contents:
- Business Challenge: Tackling Compliance, Technical Debt in an Outdated Application
- Approach: Strategic Upgrades, Dependency Management
- Results: Achieving Compliance and Enhanced Stability
What AIM Consulting did:
- Upgraded an inherited, outdated application by replacing unsupported authentication packages.
- Resolved dependency issues to ensure the application met modern compliance standards.
- Significantly improved the application’s stability and performance.
Technologies used:
- Visual Studio: Leveraged for compatibility with older SDKs and development tools.
- .NET: Multiple unsupported versions were downloaded and configured to compile the application.
- Service Fabric SDK and Runtime: Installed and configured to support the application’s architecture.
- NuGet: Managed global package dependencies, ensuring smooth upgrades and integrations.
- Microsoft.Identity.Client: Replaced outdated authentication packages to enhance security.
- Azure.Identity: Integrated for modernized authentication and improved compliance.
Business Challenge: Tackling Compliance, Technical Debt in an Outdated Application
AIM Consulting was engaged by a client managing multiple applications, one of which was an outdated and compliance-ridden application inherited from a previous development team.
This application was heavily burdened with technical debt and exhibited numerous vulnerabilities that exceeded the client’s Service Level Agreement (SLA) thresholds.
The absence of documentation further complicated the situation, making it challenging to promptly identify and address the critical issues.
Approach: Strategic Upgrades, Dependency Management
Our experts tackled these challenges head-on and made substantial progress within just a month. The approach included the following steps:
- Building a Local Development Environment: We set up a local environment to facilitate in-depth analysis and testing of the application.
- Research and Identification: We identified unsupported SDKs compatible with older Visual Studio versions, tracked the dependency chain of NuGet for global package management, and downloaded multiple unsupported versions of .NET to compile the application.
- Installing and Configuring Unsupported Tools: We installed and configured unsupported Service Fabric SDK and Service Fabric Runtime necessary for the application.
- Upgrading Authentication Packages: The application initially used outdated authentication packages like Microsoft.IdentityModel.Clients.ActiveDirectory and Microsoft.Azure.Services.AppAuthentication. These were replaced with newer packages such as Microsoft.Identity.Client and Azure.Identity.
The upgrade process posed several challenges due to the older 2019 versions not catching various downgrade errors, which only surfaced during Azure DevOps builds.
This required a deep understanding of the NuGet package dependency chain to proactively resolve these issues before they could impact the build pipeline.
Results: Achieving Compliance and Enhanced Stability
By removing outdated and vulnerable packages, AIM Consulting brought the application into compliance with modern standards, effectively resolving the compliance vulnerabilities highlighted at the outset. The key results included:
- Compliance Achievement: The application was transformed into a compliant and stable one, meeting the necessary regulatory and security standards.
- Enhanced Stability: Removing technical debt and upgrading critical components significantly improved the application’s stability and performance.
- Client Satisfaction: Despite significant technical challenges and a lack of documentation, the client’s SLA thresholds were met, and the application was secured against potential vulnerabilities.
Through dedicated efforts, AIM’s experts successfully addressed and resolved the critical issues of a highly vulnerable and outdated application. This project succeeded thanks to our technical proficiency and our commitment to ensuring client applications meet compliance standards and perform optimally.
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