It's not a secret that COVID-19 epidemic will change our world significantly. It impacts on economics and public services, especially on social services of our countries. We saw this in our country and now the same happens in US. Probably the same thing happens in all countries all over the world that suffer from COVID-19.

Usually, nowadays, such services are exposed online, but nobody expected such extreme loading of these services. And they start molder under such load. Programs start crash... and somebody has to fix them. It's just a temporary technical inconvenience when there is staff that familiar with such programs and technologies, but what about situation when programs and technologies are obsolete? When staff that may support them are about to retire due to ages, when knowledge were almost lost... It's very scary when such applications rules very important spheres of our life such social services, finances, medicine, defence etc. Something similar happened in US, so US government asked IBM about a help with their stuff written in COBOL.

Probably, in short term, they'll close the gaps, but taking in account the fact that epidemic won't dissolve in a month, there is a risk to still in the same hole... There are two ways to solve this issue in long term:

1. to make COBOL widely used program language and to teach enough programmers that will use it. This is exactly what IBM tries to do, see this article, but this way to nowhere, since it is not too popular in society of software developers.
2. to migrate such application to new technologies and new platform (e.g. Java or C# on UNIX/Windows). In this case organizations obtain scalable applications and ability to find human resources that may fix/modernize such applications step by step, in spare time, without loosing existing functionality. This is what our company Advanced may provide. And we are not alone. There are many such companies that may implement such migration on high level of quality.

And many professionals (even those that deal with COBOL on day by day basis) think that only 2nd way is viable. Let's see what will happen... More about the issue, see here.