Hi

Without a crystal ball I cannot guess what problems you will face, but let me tell you a story about a client of ours....

Many years ago, they were happily running some PB6 apps on Windows 2000 having taken the same view of not upgrading them. They were in the middle of a £40M upgrade to their oracle database infrastructure and rolling out upgrades to windows too when they hit a problem with the way DWs were working in the proposed production environment.

The whole project was on hold when they called us for help. The costs to the project were enormous and they needed a solution right now! We upgraded them to the latest versions of PB and they have used our services ever since having realised the error of their way. The problem was caused by a windows update something that could have hit their production service at any time. Unless you freeze all the environment you cannot be sure the apps will work in the future.  Freezing the environment is a major security risk as you will not receive any MS updates and subsequent security patches.

So to answer your question, the apps can stop working at any time unless you run the risk of a major security breach and do not update your operating environment. Either way the cost can be significant to resolve in a hurry where as a planned migration to the latest version is much cheaper and easier to manage.

Hope that helps.

David

Hi Bijal,

If I read between the lines it sounds like you want to just "maintain" your apps until you can "migrate" off of PowerBuilder so you want to avoid upgrading to newer versions.

You really should look at PowerBuilder 2019 R2.  By upgrading to PowerBuilder 2019 R2 you not only will be on supported version of PowerBuilder, but its new "PowerScript Migrator" feature automates migration of PowerScript to C# and .NET Core framework.  It can automate 80-90% conversion of PowerScript business logic and DataWindows data objects.

Check out this short video: https://youtu.be/Bcn6tt7H-Kk?t=69

Unless you don't plan to use Windows 10 or update your database version over the next 4-5 years,  your organization is really taking on unnecessarily high risk while significantly increasing your C# migration costs by not upgrading. 

Regards,
Armeen

Windows 10 support. That's the argument I would use.

Hi Bijal,

Deciding to keep running production on non-supported products for years on end is the same as accepting risk of any attacker benefiting from any security flaws that may be discovered in the future - and not doing anything about it. Is the impact acceptable if:

• EX #1: Large data set is lost or corrupted because somebody exploited a security flaw that has been fixed in a later release?
• EX #2: Large data set is suddenly in the hands of a major competitor because flaw was exploited?
• EX #3: Dataset containing personal sensitive data is suddenly publicly available on web because of security flaw?
• etc. ...

If somebody notifies you or the public of such security flaws is it then 100% acceptable that you  do nothing to protect the data and fix the leak?

There is no final yes or no - this is like playing heads or tails? No definitive answer but you know management, owners, and customers - what is their accepted risk level?

HTH /Michael

This is a popular asset management solution in USA that has kept up with new versions of PowerBuilder: http://www.assetpoint.com/

You might want to consider switching to a different third-party software.

Hi Bijal;

  FWIW: Its like not changing the engine oil in your car for 4-5 years. You can do that, but most people would not advise it! Basically, "totally at your own risk".

Regards ... Chris

Thank you everyone. I agree it is a big risk in not migrating to supported platform. We have few applications that we can control and will be migrating them. However we have some vendor applications that are still on 12.x platform e.g. one of Asset management solution is from https://mainsaver.com/ and they have no plan to upgrade application to new platform.