Townsend Brings Modern Crypto Capabilities To Legacy RPG Apps

Townsend Brings Modern Crypto Capabilities To Legacy RPG Apps

Published: May 18, 2016

by Alex Woodie

The field-level encryption capability that IBM introduced with IBM i 7.1 is a powerful tool for securing sensitive data. However, IBM i shops that have not modernized their legacy RPG applications with SQL access methods find it difficult to use. That should change with new technology coming out of Townsend Security this week at the COMMON conference in New Orleans.

The DB2 field procedure exit point that IBM launched in 2010 helped a lot of IBM i shops to encrypt their data on a field-level. The capability to encrypt pieces of sensitive data residing in particular parts of their DB2 for i databases, while leaving other pieces of data untouched, was a blessing to companies in retail, healthcare, and financial services industries struggling to comply with tough new security mandates.

However, the FieldProc came with a catch. While it worked just fine if your IBM i application accessed data via SQL calls, it didn't work quite so well for older RPG applications using native I/O methods to access the database. The FieldProc method proved especially troublesome for companies that organized their databases in a particular way--when they built column-level indexes for sensitive data.

Patrick Townsend, the CEO and founder of Townsend Security, explains the significance. "Many--perhaps most--IBM i customers have not been able to leverage FieldProc automatic encryption because of the inherent limitations in legacy RPG I/O," he tells IT Jungle via email. "Encrypted indexes just don't work as expected with the older I/O model."

IBM's path forward for these IBM i shops entails re-engineering RPG applications to use the SQL Query Engine (SQE). "But this means a huge investment for most IBM i customers that provides little in the way of business improvement," Townsend adds. "So most IBM i customers have been on the sidelines."

So Townsend decided to do something about it, using another relatively recent piece of IBM technology: Rational Open Access: RPG Edition, which is sometimes called OAR, ROAR, or RPG OA.