// industries - government

Government IT runs on code older than most civil servants. Time to modernise.

Most government software was never designed to last decades. It just ended up that way. Tax systems, benefits platforms, citizen records. All built on whatever was current at the time, then patched until the original developers retired. A 2016 GAO report found that several federal agencies still relied on COBOL and assembly language, some over 50 years old. When COVID-19 hit in April 2020, New Jersey's unemployment system buckled under a 1,600% surge in claims. Governor Murphy had to publicly appeal for retired COBOL programmers.1 Three years earlier, HealthCare.gov collapsed on launch day. Its front end was wired into back-end databases never designed for consumer-scale traffic.2

These aren't isolated incidents. They're what happens when modernisation is perpetually deferred.

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60%
of gov IT budgets on maintenance
15x
faster migrations
0
CI regressions
01
Escape the COBOL trap without the risk
There are billions of lines of COBOL still running in government. Tax processing, pension calculations, benefits eligibility. The logic is deeply embedded and often undocumented. The traditional answer has been a big-bang rewrite, but those have a grim track record in the public sector. The UK's Universal Credit programme, for instance, was reset twice and ran years over schedule. Bosun takes a different approach: incremental, automated migration. Frameworks get upgraded, runtimes get patched, dependencies get modernised, all validated against existing behaviour through automated test generation. No single high-risk cutover. The system keeps running while the codebase moves forward.
02
Meet compliance mandates on schedule
FedRAMP, DISA STIGs, the EU Cyber Resilience Act. The list of compliance deadlines never gets shorter. Bosun patches known vulnerabilities, upgrades to supported runtime versions, and generates audit-ready evidence automatically. Compliance stops being a fire drill.
03
Do more with frozen budgets
Public sector IT teams are stretched thin. Bosun delivers migration velocity 15x faster than manual effort, which means scarce developer time goes toward building the digital services citizens actually need rather than keeping old frameworks on life support.
04
Maintain continuity of critical services
When a benefits system goes down, real people don't get paid. Bosun's CI/CD integration validates every upgrade against existing behaviour before deployment. No regressions in systems that simply cannot afford to break.

1 CNN, April 2020

2 HHS Inspector General report, 2014

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