Mainframe to Azure migration

Mainframe applications are often complex, monolithic, and inflexible, making it challenging to adapt to evolving business needs. Infosys offers a comprehensive suite of mainframe migration and modernization services to transform these applications and transition them to a modern architecture on Azure. The typical modernization approaches include Renew, Re-engineer, Rehost, Refactor, and Replace.

Additionally, we leverage AI-powered Infosys Live Enterprise Application Development Platform, part of Infosys Cobalt and Infosys Topaz, to enable end-to-end modernization of mainframe applications.

Below is a brief description of each of the modernization approaches.

1. Renew: For mature, business-critical applications with high data and transaction volumes, retaining core business processing on the mainframe is often ideal. Infosys facilitates this by exposing mainframe functionalities as REST APIs and legacy data through data virtualization, enabling seamless integration with Azure applications.

2. Re-Engineer: Infosys adopts a two-phased approach to re-engineering - reverse engineering to extract business rules, and forward engineering to develop cloud-native applications on Azure. Infosys leverages the AI-powered Infosys Live Enterprise Application Development Platform to support reverse engineering through inventory analysis and business rules extraction, and forward engineering with environment provisioning, code generation, and DevSecOps implementation.

3. Rehost: Infosys' rehost solution for mainframe leverages the Infosys Live Enterprise Application Development Platform and partner tools to lift and shift applications from mainframes to an emulation environment in Azure. The platform supports analysis, code migration, data migration and testing. While standard technology components like COBOL and JCL are migrated as-is to target state, other languages are rewritten in a modern language using the platform’s capabilities.

4. Refactor: Refactoring is the preferred approach when technology migration is required within a short timeframe, with minimal technical debt and reduced TCO. Infosys collaborates with leading vendors to automate the conversion of legacy code to modern languages and deploy it on Azure. These automation tools support analysis, code conversion, data migration and testing.

5. Replace: In this approach, Infosys replaces mainframe applications with industry-specific or SaaS solutions on Azure. Infosys evaluates and selects suitable COTS products, performs functional gap analysis, and leverages the Infosys Live Enterprise Application Development Platform with Generative AI to extract business rules and map data models. Custom functionalities are developed, and legacy master data is migrated to implement the COTS solution.