Stromasys Charon-VAX in Highly Regulated Industries: Your Best Bet

The Impact of Old VAX Hardware on Regulated Industries

In sectors like finance, healthcare, and manufacturing, where regulation and compliance are non-negotiable, legacy hardware like VAX is a direct liability.

Apparently, your VAX servers may seem to be delivering what you need. But digging deeper reveals a host of compliance issues.

Basically, the core problem is simple: In most cases, the vendor no longer provides operating system or firmware patches for these systems. This increases the cybersecurity risk associated with the application.

Let’s look at the challenges separately:

• Data Integrity: Maintaining data integrity and accuracy on older systems is difficult. When you need to check or retrieve information, it can be a slow and confusing process (especially for audits).
• Audit Trails: Older systems might not have the robust audit trails required by regulations like FDA 21 CFR Part 11 or Sarbanes-Oxley (SOX).
• Security: Aging VAX hardware rarely receives security updates. This makes it vulnerable to cyber threats, which ultimately lead to data breaches.
• Adapting to Regulations: Legacy systems are not agile and fail to meet modern regulatory compliance. They have forced businesses to use risky manual workarounds.
• Integration Complexities: Moreover, if you rely on legacy architecture, it can be challenging and expensive to integrate modern compliance and security solutions.
• Operational Risks Lead to Compliance Challenges: As your legacy hardware ages, you are less likely to find engineers to maintain it. This talent gap compounds technical risks and makes your systems more vulnerable.

How Charon-VAX Provides the Solution

It’s clear that legacy VAX servers are a liability for businesses in highly regulated industries. But any attempt to migrate the business-critical applications to a new platform requires a significant re-validation and re-certification effort (expensive, time-consuming, and fraught with risk).

But what if you could entirely remove the risk of hardware without touching any legacy code? This is precisely what Charon-VAX from Stromasys delivers. It is a hardware emulation solution that creates a virtual VAX environment on modern servers or in the cloud.

Your old OpenVMS operating system, programs, and data are transferred to this emulated VAX environment. Your software (from its point of view) hasn’t changed. It would run as it did before, preserving your validated environment and eliminating the need for re-certification.

Here is why Charon-VAX is especially valuable for industries with tight regulations:

1. Charon-VAX directly addresses the core compliance challenges of legacy

The solution emulates the original hardware so well that native VMS audit trail mechanisms function flawlessly. This is crucial for HIPAA, SOX, and FDA 21 CFR Part 11.

The emulated system sits on new hardware, on top of a modern operating system. The manufacturer provides firmware and operating system patches, and the emulated hardware inherits benefits from the native security features of the cloud, such as Security Groups, Access Control Lists (ACLs), and, optionally, adding other services such as Web Application Firewalls (WAFs), which help to lower the cybersecurity risk.

Secondly, it helps maintain data integrity. As applications and databases behave identically, there is no (or rare) possibility of data corruption during migration.

Charon-VAX also uses both VAX security and modern host-based security. This allows you to implement contemporary firewalls, encryption, and access controls.

2. Ensures that risk mitigation is effective

With Charon-VAX, hardware obsolescence is no longer a problem. By moving your VAX environment into a virtual machine, you eliminate catastrophic hardware failure risk.

Again, it comes with advanced disaster recovery capabilities. A virtualized VAX environment can be backed up, replicated, and recovered far more easily and quickly than physical hardware. This strengthens your business continuity plan for sure.

Furthermore, there is no application migration risk involved (as your applications run unmodified). Thus, you don’t have to worry about data loss, incompatibility, and compliance gaps.

3. You can make the most of your investment by reducing maintenance costs and maximizing returns

The cost of maintaining aging VAX hardware is high. There aren’t enough space parts, and the energy consumption is substantial. This means you have to pay significantly more for maintenance.

But thanks to Charon-VAX, you can decommission expensive, energy-intensive VAX hardware and save money.

This way, you can also preserve the immense investment made in your existing applications and their validation. Even better – you don’t need any replatforming projects.

Finally, migrating to a Charon-VAX environment is quick and easy, which minimizes business disruption, a key factor in highly regulated industries.

Power Your OpenVMS Apps Even If You’re in a Regulated Industry

Now that you know replacing aging VAX hardware is easier than you think, while meeting all compliance requirements without sacrificing what already works, it’s your turn to apply the knowledge you have gained here.

Feeling overwhelmed or unsure where to start? You don’t have to figure it out alone.

At Stromasys, we assist businesses in moving away from outdated VAX hardware. Our Charon-VAX emulator replaces the original hardware, allowing you to run your critical processes in a modern environment. This ensures that you won’t have to worry about regulatory issues.

You already have the solution with you, now let’s mitigate risks from your infrastructure.