Mainframe Migration

Proven migration strategies

Moving to the cloud is not just about where your applications and infrastructure are, it's also about how your infrastructure and applications are deployed and managed.

Organizations rely on core applications that maintain system-of-record (SOR) data on the mainframe. These transactional and batch applications evolve, reflecting the accumulated changes in a business and its requirements. Typically, the SOR data that is in databases and files is shared across many business solutions that run on mainframe and distributed systems.

Let Us Take You from Mainframe to Mainstream

Online and batch programs contain business logic to maintain data integrity across business entities and to implement business policies, processes, and rules. Typically, data that is generated or updated by one application is taken as input by a downstream application. Thus, strong interdependencies and tight coupling exist within the mainframe ecosystem.

Today's technology landscape provides flexibility and agility at a lower cost than what mainframes can provide. Customers are turning to cloud platforms as a modern and flexible option for running Mainframe application workloads, while leveraging past investments in Mainframe applications and data.

Mainframe applications that are fully deployed to the cloud have the freedom to integrate proven business logic with modern technologies for data analytics or mobile enablement, expanding your business to new markets, customers, and partners. With that in mind, migrating Mainframe applications to the cloud seems more like a necessity than a luxury.

Let us walk you through a five-step methodology we have found helpful to moving Mainframe applications to the cloud.

Discover A deep technological deep dive and assessment is the first step.All applications, languages, databases, networks, platforms, and processes in your environment are cataloged. Interrelationships between applications and all external integration points are documented. If possible, use automation tools to analysis the mainframe ecosystem.

Design After doing the deep technological deep dive, its time to design the architectural solution. The design should account for all points below:

Integration with external systems
Programming language conversions and replacements
Transaction Loads
Batch Requirements
Instance Details
Third party software requirements
Future requirements

Modernize An iterative process, were changes to source code and technology frameworks are made. If the modified code compiles, it’s ready for unit testing. If it doesn’t, developers should review the errors, find a fix, update the migration rules, and run the program(s) through the engine again. Many times, error fixes in one program may be applied en masse to fix the same errors in other programs, giving you the ability to leverage economies of scale.

Test Testing should focus on newly developed code, integration, data accesses, sorting routines that may be affected by using ASCII vs. EBCDIC and code modifications to accommodate data type changes. Because many legacy applications have few, if any, test scripts and documentation, you will likely need to spend time and resources to develop test scripts. We recommend investing the time in developing the proper test procedures to make your applications more robust.

Implement When migrated applications have been tested, verified, and optimized, the process of deploying those applications can begin. In reality, many deployment activities are initiated in parallel with earlier phases—things like creating and configuring AWS instances, installing and configuring Mainframe emulation software (e.g. Astadia OpenMCS), migrating static data, and other infrastructure or framework activities.