I have a legacy application that is running on Java 1.7. And I need to connect to Microsoft SQL Server 2022. When I do this, I am getting an exception of

Caused by: org.apache.commons.dbcp.SQLNestedException: Cannot create PoolableConnectionFactory (The driver could not establish a secure connection to SQL Server by using Secure Sockets Layer (SSL) encryption. Error: SQL Server did not return a response. The connection has been closed..)

If I read the documentation correctly, I need a JDK version of minimum 1.8 to upgrade the JDBC driver that supports SQL Server 2022. Is there any workaround for this?