This is the best summary I could come up with:

IBM, eager to keep those legacy functions on its Z mainframe systems, wants that code rewritten in Java.

In a technical blog post specific to COBOL conversion, IBM's Kyle Charlet, CTO for zSystems software, steps up to the plate and says what a lot of people have said about COBOL: It's not just the code; it's the business logic, the edge-cases, and the institutional memory, or the lack thereof.

IBM's watsonx, Charlet writes, could help large organizations decouple individual services from monolithic COBOL apps.

While COBOL codebases can be relatively stable and secure—once found to be among the least problematic in a broad survey—the costs of updating and extending them are gigantic.

Legacy COBOL was one of the reasons the Office of Personnel Management suffered a deeply intrusive break-in in 2015, as the antiquated code could not be encrypted or made to work with other secure systems.

But there's a recurring argument that COBOL is good at managing business-specific systems and exchanges in ways that (some might argue) present fewer attack vectors.

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