Ha, I just came across this article in the CIO magazine that describes the functionality of the new Visual Cobol R3 by Microfocus and it looks like they are expanding the lifetime of the Cobol programing language (go figure, right? – I thought we had enough issues around year 2000 searching drastically for all those Cobol programmers 
). Nevertheless if you are a Cobol fan, why not try running your applications on the Windows Azure platform:
“…For Azure-based applications, Visual Cobol takes advantage of Visual Studio 2010's innate capability to publish an application to an Azure cloud, the application hosting service offered by Microsoft and its partners. It is the first version of Visual Cobol to offer this capability, Anderton said….”
Would love to hear any thoughts or practices around this….