In this day and age, it’s all about the upgrade. Whether it’s your cell phone or a hotel room or a seat on an airplane, an upgrade is generally a good thing that is welcomed. But there is at least one type of upgrade that some may view as daunting and unwelcome:

The ColdFusion (CF) Upgrade.

But it doesn’t have to be that way. If your web-based application or website runs on an older version of ColdFusion, resisting the upgrade could mean the difference between efficiency and disaster. So how do you know if you need an upgrade and what’s involved?

If you are running on a legacy version of ColdFusion, it may no longer be supported by Adobe. That means if new vulnerabilities are exposed, patches will not be made available, leaving your ColdFusion unprotected. In addition, not having Adobe support means losing access to new features and updates that are being released in newer versions of ColdFusion. This includes security encryption levels used to transmit sensitive data. As the Internet has matured, so have accepted encryption levels. The standard for this is moving from TLS (Transport Layer Security) 1.1 to TLS 1.2. Versions of ColdFusion older than CF 10 are not able to support TLS 1.2. So when the standard does finally move to TLS 1.2, payment gateways like Authorize.net are not going to accept anything less than this new standard.

The good news is, bumping your system up to at least Coldfusion 10 or higher can keep you compliant.

So let’s say you’ve made the decision to upgrade. What’s next? Well, if you didn’t already partner with a team of ColdFusion experts to determine if you did or didn’t need the upgrade, now is the time to do that. You’ll want a firm that has a proven track record working with legacy ColdFusion and performing successful upgrades. WRIS Web Services has that experience, and when a company partners with us, here’s what they can expect:

Discovery

During Discovery, we assess the situation and come up with a ColdFusion upgrade plan. Typically, this includes us gaining access to your Legacy ColdFusion environment so that we can investigate the code and server setup. We also typically create a local version of the setup so that we have the ColdFusion code and database and can check everything out independently from the production environment.

Upgrade Plan

After our review and analysis of the current situation, we present you with our plan for the upgrade. With your approval, we’re ready go to.

Upgrade

Typically the upgrade involves a migration to new hardware or a new virtual server. This new environment is usually located on your network but can exist in ours if necessary. This is where we install the new version of ColdFusion. Currently, that version is ColdFusion 2016, because if you are doing a ColdFusion upgrade, why not take advantage of the most current version?

After we install and setup the ColdFusion server we move your code base to that server, link it up with a copy of your database, and begin testing. If we see any obvious issues, we fix those before turning it back over to you. And because you, the Client, know your ColdFusion application the best, we ask that you do additional testing and anything you find we investigate and remedy.

Once there is approval from all sides, this new environment usually becomes the new production (live) environment. Upgrade complete!

This whole process usually takes around 30 hours per application, but of course we provide an estimate before any work commences.

And as an added bonus, not only are you now upgraded to the latest version of ColdFusion and ready to roll, but our performing the upgrade puts us in a great position to support the app(s) moving forward, allowing us to establish a long-term relationship with you, our new Client.