Amid the ongoing digital transformation revolution, many organizations continue using monolithic legacy systems like IBM AS400 for hosting enterprise applications. AS400 systems’ technology-independent machine (TIM) architecture is optimal for hosting enterprise apps with greater uptime and continuity. However, for maintaining better operational excellence, AS400-hosted enterprise apps should be receptive toward scaling and security improvements.
These scalability and security goals can be achieved when organizations migrate their AS400 applications to an enterprise-grade cloud infrastructure like Azure. The migration enables businesses to leverage scalable cloud resources for app workflow and data management while minimizing dependency on complex hardware resources. Moreover, Azure’s security firewall protects AS400 applications from unauthorized access and network attacks.
Addressing AS400 Azure Migration Challenges with Skilled Consultants
AS400 migration to Azure is a time-intensive endeavor that necessitates meticulous planning and application reengineering efforts. By delegating this migration initiative to in-house IT professionals, enterprises may largely risk the integrity of the AS400 application’s logic, causing disruptions to business continuity.
As an alternative, organizations can hire migration experts from a reputable AS400 consulting company. These experts can effectively assess AS400 application requirements and create a detailed roadmap for strategic migration. By configuring the algorithms, rules, and workflows of AS400 applications, migration experts ensure a smooth transition of app logic into the Azure environment. Besides, AS400 consultants can overcome key Azure migration challenges like:
- Codebase Incompatibility – The codebase of AS400 applications is typically encoded using RPG or COBOL. Such codebases are not natively supported by the Azure computing environment, thereby resulting in incompatibility issues. To overcome this, AS400 consultants perform code reengineering and refactoring activities to transform the legacy codebase into a modern code structure. This improves the cloud compatibility of AS400 applications.
- Data Loss – During the migration of AS400 application data to Azure infrastructure, the possibility of data loss and deletions is higher. AS400 consultants use automated data migration tools to tactically map and shift data from the AS400 DB2 database to Azure SQL DB. This approach helps in minimizing app data loss and improving migration precision.
- Security Vulnerabilities – Migrating AS400 applications and their data to Azure without adequate planning results in security misconfigurations. This makes the AS400 applications more susceptible to breaches and cyberattacks. To maintain a better security posture, AS400 consultants use firewalls and virtual private networks (VPNs). This offers better protection for AS400 application’s data and workloads during lifting and shifting process.
Best Practices for AS400 Application Migration to Azure
- Strategic Evaluation and Migration
Performing a thorough analysis of the AS400 application before migration to Azure is essential. AS400 consultants are skilled in executing comprehensive application ecosystem analysis and classifying the application’s dependencies, architecture, and performance metrics. Similarly, consultants prioritize collaborating with app administrators and stakeholders to understand requirements like improving scalability, minimizing operational costs, and others.
The extensive analysis and stakeholder collaboration enables AS400 consultants to determine the right migration approach and create a migration plan. Key migration approaches followed by AS400 consultants include:
- Lift and Shift- In this approach, consultants simply move AS400 applications to Azure without any changes in the codebase.
- Refactoring – This migration approach is preferred when AS400 applications require extensive codebase modification to adapt to Azure’s hosting specifications.
- Re-platforming- This approach involves implementing minor changes to an AS400 application’s codebase in order to harness certain capabilities of Azure cloud like microservices and serverless computing.
While creating the migration roadmap, AS400 experts clearly outline the timelines, resource requirements, and risk management procedures.
- Data Cleanup
AS400 migration consultants strategically transfer the data and workloads related to an AS400 application from the DB2 database to Azure’s SQL database. Since the AS400 platform’s DB2 database is object-oriented, the application data will be stored in an unstructured format. This format cannot be directly migrated to Azure’s SQL database. SQL database is a relational database and supports only structured data format. That’s why AS400 consultants perform the data cleanup process before migration.
This helps in standardizing the data format of AS400 applications and removing inconsistencies and redundancies. In simple terms, cleanup ensures that only structured and appropriate AS400 application data is transferred to the Azure database, thereby improving the application integrity.
- Testing
After migrating the AS400 application and data to Azure, consultants perform a range of testing procedures to ensure smooth execution and greater availability. The migration process might have introduced changes in the AS400 application’s interactions with third-party tools. Through integration testing, consultants check and ensure that all the integration touchpoints of AS400 applications work coherently.
Other tests performed by consultants after migration include functional and performance testing. Functional testing is crucial to check the synchronization of an AS400 application’s logic and functionalities with business requirements. Similarly, performance testing enables consultants to measure key metrics of AS400 applications like response times, resource consumption, and transaction throughput.
- Performance Optimization
Consultants assess the resource requirements of migrated AS400 applications for strategic resource allocation. They compare the existing configuration of AS400 applications against the expected performance needs and allocate Azure cloud resources accordingly. For instance, if an AS400 application is required to automatically scale its CPU utilization based on incoming traffic, then consultants integrate Azure Queue (an autoscaling system) with the application. This ensures that the application remains responsive even under peak times and maintains business continuity.
In addition, consultants from a reputable AS400 migration services provider integrate Azure’s content delivery network (CDN) with AS400 applications to optimize the distribution of static and dynamic content. This reduces latency in content delivery and improves the application performance. CDN integration is valuable for optimizing the performance of AS400 applications with large user bases.
- Documentation
AS400 consultants document the whole migration process using Azure’s intuitive documentation tool. This document aids internal stakeholders and IT teams in tracking changes and performance optimizations in the migrated IBM i applications. The documentation is also helpful in performing security and compliance audits on Azure-hosted AS400 applications.
Summing Up
To sum up, migrating AS400 applications to Azure cloud infrastructure requires greater experience and expertise. Hence, businesses should consider hiring dedicated IBM i consultants from a reputable services provider. These consultants follow proactive migration strategies and ensure hassle-free migration for businesses.
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