GoFAST is already the fruit of more than 10,000 man-days of development, integration, testing and patching. GoFAST has demonstrated its superiority in terms of user interface and functionality in a maximum confidentiality/security environment, which has enabled it to win a number of major accounts and outgoing migrations of Sharepoint and Teams. But this is no reason, as they say, to rest on our laurels, which is a lethal attitude in IT because it allows what is known as the 'technological debt' to grow. In 2024, we have several challenges to meet:
- a change of operating system, with RedHat stopping CentOS 7 in June 2024
- the move to a containerised architecture
- the switch to Drupal 10
This list also includes prototyping the use of AI. GoFAST v4.3, scheduled for release at the end of May, will be an important step in this technological overhaul..
With regard to the change of operating system, we carried out a major comparative study in 2023, taking into account a number of criteria, particularly in the area of security: having an operating system with security patches published quickly, compatibility with OpenSCAP security profiles (configuration audit) and our vulnerability scanning tools (Tenable). Of course, other criteria were also taken into account, such as compatibility with the hypervisors on the market (VMWare, HyperV, KVM) and ease of migration, which meant keeping a RedHat-compatible distribution.
We therefore considered Redhat, of course (at additional cost), Oracle Linux, Rockylinux and Almalinux, the latter being the final choice.
The operating system has been hardened to target an ANSSI BP 28 Enhanced security configuration, the highest ANSSI level. Note that this level is more or less the same as the American CIS Level 2.
Nous en avons profité également pour utiliser des modèles d’installation (dit ‘kickstart’) normalisant notamment le partitionnement.
Another major development is the move to a containerised environment. Containerisation has a number of advantages, including greater scalability and redundancy, and in our case, simplifying and speeding up upgrades for our customers.
We have already transformed 'GoFAST Community' into a container in the summer of 2023, and we have therefore extended this major overhaul to the GoFAST v4.3 version, known as 'NG'.
It should be noted that for version 4.3, only the GoFAST version of CEO-Vision will be used in a containerised version in order to get as much feedback as possible before a gradual roll-out to our customers, which will surely take place in a later version. This initial operation will take place without Kubernetes, which is planned for a later date.
Finally, the GoFAST 4.3 version will have a service that will be migrated to Drupal 10, in order to test the total migration that is planned for the end of the year, most likely under the name of the GoFAST v5 version, once again a major project.
Finally, we have begun prototyping an initial service assisted by Artificial Intelligence (AI). Of course, we have a number of constraints in this area, notably that the model must be opensource and usable onpremise or as a dedicated SaaS for each customer to ensure absolute confidentiality.
Initially, the aim is for the AI to suggest a category. Following a learning process based on production documents, GoFAST will suggest the associated category (Invoice, Contract, ....). We have also prototyped the recognition of metadata in unstructured documents, for example finding the surface area in a lease, and the detection of personal data.
Finally, later in the year, or even in 2025, experiments will be carried out on the introduction of AI into the research part of the platform. As we can see, 2024 is a very important year in terms of architecture and the introduction of new technologies such as Artificial Intelligence. This will enable the GoFAST platform to enter the next decade with the most advanced technologies on the market.