In the corporate ecosystem, organizations of all sizes and verticals have built and deployed custom enterprise apps in their digital infrastructure. These applications are designed to handle data storage/exchange, internal team collaboration, and complex business operations. However, several organizations continue to work with enterprise apps developed and hosted on legacy environments like IBM AS400. IBM AS400 is a decades-old integrated operating system that supports creating and hosting traditional green-screen applications. However, enterprise applications with green-screen interfaces necessitate internal teams to handle repetitive workflows through a monotonous display, thereby impacting employee experience.
Moreover, hosting enterprise apps on AS400 incurs higher hosting costs for organizations. Businesses that rely on AS400 systems should invest in continuous maintenance and support services to implement essential upgrades/patches and keep the enterprise applications functional. This eventually necessitates businesses to invest huge capital for maintenance in the long term, resulting in higher hosting and operational costs. To reduce these costs and improve employee experience, organizations should consider migrating their enterprise apps from legacy to cloud environments like Azure.
Ensuring Hassle-Free Transition with AS400 Migration Services
Moving enterprise apps from AS400 to the Azure environment eliminates the need for organizations to invest in or maintain physical AS400 hardware and servers, thereby reducing huge capital investments. The Azure cloud ecosystem offers virtual compute, server, storage, and other essential infrastructure resources to host and scale (up/down) enterprise apps without any significant investments. Similarly, the migration enables businesses to transform the interface of AS400 applications from the green-screen to the modern graphical user interface (GUI). This interface enables employees to easily navigate enterprise app workflows and tabs, resulting in higher employee experience and productivity.
However, to implement the migration seamlessly and reduce hosting costs, organizations should consider partnering with a reputable AS400 migration to Azure services provider. Dedicated migration experts have in-depth knowledge of Azure and AS400 architecture, enabling them to plan and execute successful migration initiatives. They utilize automated tools for the key processes involved in AS400 Azure migration, such as code conversion, data transformation, application re-hosting, security testing, and optimization. Some other benefits of hiring dedicated migration specialists include:
- Mitigating Downtime Risks – Shifting enterprise apps from AS400 to Azure can be challenging, particularly when organizations rely on them to handle crucial operations. Any minor disruption during the migration process might result in major data loss or downtime. That’s why skilled migration experts prioritize conducting risk assessments to discover application dependencies, potential security vulnerabilities, and integration challenges at the earliest. This analysis enables them to devise migration plans with adequate contingency measures and overcome downtime.
- Cost-Effectiveness- The process of AS400 app migration to Azure might become cost-intensive if not effectively planned and executed. Hence, migration experts devise and implement appropriate cost optimization measures, such as resource right-sizing, consolidation, and containerization during migration. These measures contribute to reducing businesses’ Azure cloud infrastructure operational costs.
- Post-Migration Security Support – After migrating AS400 enterprise applications to Azure, migration experts incorporate key security mechanisms like data encryption and role-based access controls within the apps. These mechanisms protect enterprise applications against unauthorized access, breaches, and external security threats.
Key Processes Involved in AS400 Enterprise Application Migration to Azure
- Code Dependency Mapping and Refactoring
Enterprise applications hosted on the AS400 environment typically consist of interconnected code dependencies. These dependencies enable applications to interact with other key architecture components like databases, communication protocols, and logic processing units. Mapping and migrating these code dependencies is crucial to ensure the effective functioning of enterprise apps. Skilled AS400 migration experts use automated tools to assess and identify the dependencies of enterprise applications.
Before shifting the code dependencies to the Azure cloud, migration experts perform the refactoring process. Code dependency refactoring refers to modifying the application’s code structure and logic to make it more suitable for the Azure cloud environment. During this process, migration experts remove redundant/outdated scripts in code dependencies and containerize them using the Azure Container Instances (ACI) tool. By containerizing code dependencies, experts ensure greater security of enterprise application’s logic and configurations.
- Data Transformation
Typically, enterprise applications store data in various structures, formats, and schemas. However, Azure Cloud’s SQL database supports the storage of structured application datasets. To ensure greater data compatibility, skilled AS400 migration specialists transform enterprise app datasets before migration. Migration specialists utilize the Azure Data Factory tool to structure application datasets. By utilizing the Data Factory tool, migration experts remove errors, duplicates, or invalid fields within application datasets.
Moreover, Azure migration experts use the Data Factory tool to standardize and convert the format of unstructured datasets. During the format conversion process, experts configure the structure and schema of datasets and ensure that they are easily processed by Azure’s analytics or artificial intelligence (AI) models. In simpler terms, migration experts ensure that the enterprise application’s datasets are dynamically processed and queried by Azure’s analytics ecosystem after migration.
- Application Migration
This phase involves shifting the containerized code dependencies, structured datasets, and digital footprint of AS400-hosted enterprise applications to the Azure cloud environment. AS400 migration experts use automated tools to move and re-host enterprise applications on the Azure ecosystem without altering the codebase and configurations. By embracing the re-hosting approach, experts minimize the enterprise application re-engineering efforts and speed up the time-to-migrate value. After the migration, experts configure and incorporate disaster recovery mechanisms in the enterprise applications hosted on the Azure ecosystem. These mechanisms consistently backup data and protect enterprise applications against data loss and breach risks.
- Testing and Optimization
AS400 migration experts offer post-migration testing and optimization support to overcome performance and security issues in enterprise applications. Some of the key tests performed by migration experts include functionality testing, compatibility testing, and disaster recovery testing. During functionality testing, migration experts validate the effectiveness of the application’s API integrations, UI/UX, and business logic and ensure that the application works as per the organization’s requirements.
Similarly, disaster recovery testing enables migration experts to simulate failover scenarios and protect Azure-hosted enterprise applications against data loss and downtime. Apart from testing, AS400 migration experts implement cost and security optimization measures to improve the operational efficiency of enterprise applications and make the most of the Azure cloud ecosystem.
Closing Thoughts
To sum up, migrating enterprise applications from AS400 to the Azure ecosystem offers substantial benefits for organizations. However, for a seamless transition, organizations should consider hiring skilled experts from a reputable AS400 migration services provider. These experts strategically plan and implement code dependency mapping, data transformation, re-hosting, and optimization. Moreover, by migrating to Azure, experts incorporate analytics, artificial intelligence, machine learning, and other advanced technologies with enterprise applications. By leveraging these technologies, businesses can improve the overall operational efficiency of enterprise apps.