AS400 Migration: A Robust Solution to Reduce Operational Costs

For several mid and large businesses, AS400 has been a preferred choice to run several mission critical ERP’s to streamline business operations. As businesses expand and emerging technologies disrupt various processes, enterprises are exploring ways to reduce the cost of supporting and maintaining AS400 applications. This is coupled with the need to enable faster application delivery, gain clear visibility into how IT impacts the business and reduce manual effort. This is driving enterprises to consider AS400 migration initiatives to significantly improve system agility, scalability and operational efficiencies.

And this is one of the key reasons, there is an ever-increasing demand to modernize, migrate and integrate AS400 applications.
AS400 Migration is a broad term that is used to deploy- the portfolios of AS400 applications -on the cloud to reduce cost and increase scalability, without any modifications.

Depending upon the business objectives, it could comprise migration of the batch jobs to the cloud for optimal use of all business systems.After migration to open source databases you can integrate to multiple cross platform or cloud based applications and leverage your existing AS400 operational data.

AS400 Migration to SQL server or to any other advanced database will help several businesses regain large volumes of valuable information and leverage core business logic.SQL server is an open source platform, which enables small applications to run independently or along with ERP’s.

Migration of AS400 can be challenging owing to its monolithic code that has been developed over decades. Several organizations lack detailed understanding of AS400 applications and related batch jobs. In addition their in-house knowledge is often limited and these subject matter experts (SMEs) are not well versed with migration. To ensure business continuity and sustainability, it’s recommended to carefully evaluate cloud migration on factors such as desirability, feasibility and viability.

There cannot be an ideal or proscribed approach for AS400 migrations, as it varies from business to business depending upon the desired goal. The common approach for migration is to keep old and new systems in sync using hybrid cloud architecture and ensure that end-to-end processes are not broken. Additionally, large amounts of data can be cleansed, transformed and migrated to cloud in a secure manner.

Re-hosting

This is one of the highly suitable approaches from an end-user’s perspective as, existing interfaces or functionality are kept unchanged. It is highly advisable to identify a remediation plan before migration.

Re-engineer

This helps AS400 applications and processes to access cloud native workloads for future-proof architecture.This approach is recommended when existing AS400 applications are unable to meet future-state business requirements or an agile target architecture.

A migration approach that worked for a particular organization may not necessarily work for your business. Therefore, it is important to find a best-fit solution which can help in achieving your goals. AS400 Experts at Integrative Systems can help you with cost assessments and feasibility frameworks for migrating your system critical applications to SQL server.