Department of Homeland Security Still Uses COBOL (softpedia.com)

The Department of Defense has promised to finally stop managing the U.S. nuclear arsenal with floppy disks "by the end of 2017". But an anonymous reader shares Softpedia's report about another startling revelation this week from the Government Accountability Office: Another agency that plans to upgrade is the US Department of Veterans Affairs, which uses COBOL, a programming language from the '50s to manage a system for employee time and attendance. Unfortunately for the VA, there were funds only to upgrade that COBOL system, because the agency still uses the antiquated programming language to run another system that tracks claims filed by veterans for benefits, eligibility, and dates of death. This latter system won't be updated this year. Another serious COBOL user is the Department of Homeland Security, who employs it to track hiring operations, alongside a 2008 IBM z10 mainframe and a Web component that uses a Windows 2012 server running Java.
Personnel files are serious business. A 2015 leak of the secret service's confidential personnel files for a Utah Congressman (who was leading a probe into high-profile security breaches and other missteps) led the Department of Homeland Security to discipline 41 secret service agents.

Comments

Re: What's wrong with using COBOL?

[Anonymous Coward]

It's not webscale you see

Hey, that's me!

[14erCleaner]

Many of the stories about this say their systems "are about 56 years old and use an outdated computer language". That's actually a pretty good description of me! Well, I'm 58 and I use several outdated computer languages, but anyway...

Re: What's wrong with using COBOL?

[Junta]

Everyone knows the only webscale language is javascript, and the only webscale way to store data is MongoDB. There is no other approach. This is why, for example, Facebook is not webscale.