How AS400 Cloud Migration Future-proof IT Infrastructure

ByElena Mia
IBM i services

Migration is becoming a highly popular option for enterprises looking to upgrade their tech infrastructure without investing substantial time and resources into a hardware on-site system. Several modern Cloud service providers are launching innovative functionalities and opportunities for enterprises to migrate and improve their application’s security. Through a solid migration strategy, enterprises can migrate critical applications from IBM’s AS400 servers to a Cloud environment and maintain a competitive advantage.

Understanding AS400 Migration to Cloud

As stated before, using legacy (outdated) AS400 systems for running and managing enterprise applications or workloads introduce a slew of challenges. Some of them include higher maintenance costs, incompatibility with modern business solutions and technologies, and poor data security and usability. However, enterprises can overcome these complexities with AS400 migration to Cloud. When migrating enterprise applications to the Cloud from AS400 servers, organizations can facilitate a powerful user experience (UX) and future-proof their IT infrastructure.

How to Perform Seamless AS400 Migration

Migrating enterprise applications from AS400 to Cloud is a complex process and differs from business-to-business. The complexity of migration depends on an organization’s business requirements, priorities, and the nature of the application they’re shifting. Enterprise applications, particularly those that have been used for years have exclusive attributes that need dedicated planning.

Migration experts from the right service providers address every crucial aspect starting from security and compliance to integration requirements. Some of the key steps followed by experts before and after AS400 Cloud migration are:

  • Perform a SWOT Analysis – Running an objective analysis of the strengths, weaknesses, threats, and opportunities before migrating from AS400 gives experts a holistic view regarding potential operational, financial, and technical obstacles.
  • Evaluate AS400 Infrastructure– By using appropriate assessment and planning tools, migration experts assess a business’ AS400 server before migration. It helps IT professionals understand how ready the applications, document workloads, and processes are to migrate to the Cloud.
  • Re-architecting– Migration experts re-architect the legacy AS400 codebase and establish applications in a more scalable way. This approach eliminates code restrains and improves the application’s business-relevant functionality.
  • Organize a Pilot Migration– Migration experts run and test a pilot migration approach, to ensure that how enterprise applications work in Cloud environments in a simulated way.
  • Migration & Testing – Once experts prepare the blueprint, they can seamlessly migrate AS400 legacy applications to the Cloud. Testing after migration is critical. Experts ensure that application data is present and all users can access every functionality in the app, thereby improving security and compliance.

Benefits of AS400 Cloud Migration

  • Infrastructure Versatility

One of the key benefits of shifting enterprise applications and workloads from AS400 to the Cloud is exceptional flexibility. When applications are migrated to the Cloud environment from AS400 servers, they become self-regulating and no longer depend on hardware sources, which in turn makes the application future-ready. The migration makes AS400 applications more receptive to changing business needs and fulfills unforeseen demand levels.

  • Faster Disaster Recovery

Cyber threats always emerge over enterprise applications hosted on legacy servers such as AS400. Whether caused by server failure or malicious ransomware, it may result in a loss of access to crucial data in applications, a complete downtime, and a significant delay in providing app services to customers. Overall, disastrous threats to AS400 applications can negatively affect the reputation of an enterprise.

Fortunately, enterprises can completely overcome the cyber threats by migrating AS400 workloads to the Cloud. With AS400 Cloud migration, enterprises can store their app data in virtual servers. This way, organizations can quickly recover the data and make their app processes immune to cyber disasters and downtime situations. Unlike conventional disaster recovery options like secondary data centers or servers for backup, businesses can ensure fast recovery of the application data with Cloud migration at lesser costs.

  • Lesser Maintenance

AS400-based application hosting demands regular maintenance from enterprises including software upgrades, hardware updates, and more, which eventually increases the overhead expenses. Shifting applications to the Cloud helps enterprises in minimizing the cost of regular server maintenance. Being Cloud as the hosting medium, organizations don’t need to delegate a team of IT developers for daily maintenance since the Cloud service providers take care of nearly all the phases. On the whole, Cloud-based AS400 application migration incurs lower cost of maintenance.

  • Control Operational Expenses

Organizations that deal with various mission-critical processes prefer AS400 systems for application hosting. However, with constant business growth over the years, many of them are experiencing problems related to scalability and time-intensive maintenance.

To overcome these problems, enterprises can hire AS400 migration services providers. AS400 migration experts can help enterprises enhance the scalability of their enterprise applications while cutting down on high operational costs. Another best thing about transitioning applications from AS400 to the Cloud is the ‘pay-as-per-resources’ model provided by many leading platforms. Meaning that organizations need to pay only for computing resources they utilize on the Cloud infrastructure on a monthly basis. In a nutshell, running mission-critical applications on the Cloud is way cheaper than on AS400 servers.

Summing UP

Migrating AS400 applications to the Cloud can be a lengthy and complex process, which is why so many organizations continue to work with this legacy server. However, experts with rich expertise in migration can guide businesses through the entire process, as well as help enterprises reduce costs, improve security, and get the most out of the Cloud platform.