Migrating applications to modern environments may be seen as the best moves for digital businesses, but the process is often messier and more painful than expected. Larry Long, director of engineering at FNTS, recently penned a post that points out the inherent complexity of such projects.
“Because mainframes are often in service for long periods of time, applications and workloads residing on them grow in complexity," he writes. "It’s best to base migration decisions on their critical nature, security concerns and each application’s dependencies, which requires detailed application dependency mapping.”
In addition, there is scaling the migrated applications, which adds additional complexities. Other application complexities can also manifest, he notes, through “a lack of a detailed understanding of the application's code, purpose and documentation since rewriting code may be necessary for optimum performance on a different system” as well as “mainframe applications sharing a common data store that may require new application code to ensure that shared mainframe databases and new platform databases stay in sync.”