Keep legacy applications secure with Extended Security Maintenance

Application updates come and go, often they provide your business with added value, but sometimes an update isn’t what is needed or wanted for a legacy application.

Choosing not to update an application can cause issues. Often, that application becomes unsupported, and with security patches no longer available, it can see your business falling foul of regulatory demands, such as GDPR or security threats.

Ubuntu LTS users have a five-year window for support, for ITstrategen, when that window came to an end on 12.04, some of ITstrategen’s customers still depended on servers running the now out of support operating system and without support, the security of those servers was at risk.

The German hosting provider, which was founded in 2011 and supports some of Germany’s most successful businesses, uses Ubuntu as its server operating system.

To solve this problem, ITstrategen to purchase Extended Support Maintenance (ESM) for Ubuntu 12.04, a service offered as part of their Ubuntu Advantage subscription. ESM extends support for Ubuntu 12.04 via continued updates, keeping the operating system secure even after the end of the standard five-year window.

Thomas Reinhold, Managing Director of ITstrategen, said: “When we discovered that Canonical was offering a new, extended support package, we didn’t hesitate to sign up.

“ESM effectively rendered the security problem a non-issue.”

ESM enables ITstrategen to continue running Ubuntu 12.04 without any need for workarounds, eliminating the need for customers to refactor their applications ahead of schedule.

The extended support gives customers the freedom to update in their own time, without any urgent deadline.

ESM was introduced for Ubuntu 12.04 LTS as a way to extend the availability of critical and important security patches beyond the nominal End of Life date of Ubuntu 12.04. With the end of the five-year Standard Security Maintenance window for 14.04 LTS in April 2019, Canonical announced the availability of ESM for Ubuntu 14.04.

To find out more about ESM and how ITstrategen found it to be the perfect solution for securing its servers, read the case study below.

Read the case study