FastPaaS: Why You Need to Know About it Before You Modernize Your Mainframe

Introducing FASTPaaS

Recently, I took my family to Disney World and I knew I didn’t want to wait in long lines, especially in the heat. So, I purchased Disney FastPass+ for my entire family. As we boarded one of the rides, I saw the long line next to me and knew buying the FastPass was a good decision. But this led me to thinking that what we need in the mainframe modernization world is a similar “fast pass to the cloud.” With some tweaking of the idea, this led to the formation of a partnership called FASTPaaS.

FASTPaaS is a unique approach to rapidly and safely migrating your mainframe assets to the cloud. FASTPaaS incorporates:

· The best cloud platform from Microsoft Azure

· The best IT modernization tools from Micro Focus

· The best mainframe modernization services from Astadia

This integrated migration methodology incorporates all key features from end to end, delivering a holistic migration solution that addresses key elements - from DevOps and testing to integrated security and compliance, from high availability to disaster recovery.

Better still, FASTPaaS is not only a fast path to mainframe migration, but it also ensures safe passage and low risk because you are working with a team that has decades of proven expertise and has mastered IT modernization.

What Does IT Modernization Mean?

The shift from proprietary, mainframe-based infrastructures to flexible cloud models provides organizations with significant opportunities to save time and money.

For organizations that have mainframes in place, IT modernization helps unlock critical mainframe data by migrating it to less expensive, modern platforms that enable cloud services such as Machine Learning, Advanced Analytics, Artificial Intelligence, mobile technologies, and modern development approaches like DevOps.

On the other hand, e-commerce and internet startup organizations are not purchasing mainframes at all. Instead, they are choosing to leverage the cloud to manage all business applications, making public cloud platforms, such as Azure, the new mainframe environment with a power that is equal to or surpasses the traditional mainframe platform.

FASTPaaS Under the Hood

Let’s spend some time looking under the hood to better understand what FASTPaaS is and how your organization can benefit. Let’s start with the platform and work our way up to discuss tools and services.

Microsoft

Microsoft Azure’s ever-expanding suite of cloud computing services gives organizations the freedom to build and manage applications across a global network. With data centers in more regions than any other cloud provider, Azure has a global reach and a local presence that businesses require. Companies can reduce the cost, time, and complexity of operating a global infrastructure, while meeting local data residency requirements.

Perhaps that’s why 90 percent of all Fortune 500 companies rely on Azure to drive their business. With full support of open-source technologies, your IT team can unlock the modern tools and technologies of their choice. Virtually any application can run on Azure using any data source or existing operating system. Security and privacy are built into the platform – ensuring the highest levels of trust, transparency, and regulatory compliance of any cloud platform on the market today.

Azure is also a critical component for future-proofing the infrastructure to prepare for the world of intelligent cloud and intelligent edge. As the foundation for intelligent cloud, Azure drives ubiquitous computing across every type of intelligent application and system. Helping businesses capitalize on the intelligent edge, Azure ensures businesses can continuously expand the set of connected systems and devices that gather and analyze.

With Azure as the underlying infrastructure, companies can combine the limitless computing power of the cloud with intelligent and perceptive devices to deliver a framework for building immersive and impactful business solutions.

Micro Focus

With Micro Focus, organizations can dramatically enhance the value of their core mainframe systems to transform infrastructures, boost agility, and optimize the cost of their IT investments. With more than four decades of modernization experience, Micro Focus software is focused on effective application migration and re-platforming – a safe and cost-effective mechanism to transition the infrastructure.

With a robust approach to deploying COBOL and legacy applications on new modern platforms, Micro Focus solutions are tailor-made for individual environments. This reduces your Total Cost of Ownership (TCO), dependency on proprietary hardware, and minimizes the risk to your business by preserving your COBOL investments, legacy application logic, and data.

Regardless of the platform, Micro Focus offers the broadest choice for application re-platforming. The company’s solutions move existing COBOL applications into a new, more flexible environment. Supported by these offerings, Micro Focus customers, such as SNS Bank in The Netherlands, have been able to automatically convert 95 percent of their COBOL code to future-proof their infrastructure. Others, like the City of Miami, were able to drive a 50 percent reduction in IT operations costs by modernizing their existing Unisys COBOL system.

Micro Focus offers three solutions as part of FASTPaaS:

· Enterprise Analyzer – Intelligence and analysis technology that provides insight into core processes

· Enterprise Developer – an integrated development environment (IDE) for mainframe applications that can leverage Eclipse and Visual Studio to streamline mainframe application development

· Enterprise Server – The deployment and execution environment for Visual COBOL applications

Astadia

An industry pioneer in mainframe migration services, Astadia handles millions of lines of code every year - transitioning core mainframe workloads and applications to powerful, fast, and cost-effective cloud environments like Microsoft Azure.

Astadia delivers a critical, three-stage approach to modernization, which includes:

· A comprehensive mainframe and application assessment

· A highly proactive approach to mainframe modernization

· Application modernization and ongoing optimization

In a proven approach, the Astadia team first analyzes your existing technology platforms, applications, processes, and resources. This is the stage where application validation and rationalization take place – a critical element that many migration projects underestimate. Applications to be migrated are identified, application upgrades are pinpointed, and end-of-life determinations are made. The outcome of this stage is a personalized migration journey map – with processes, outcomes, and potential pitfalls identified up-front.

In Stage 2, Astadia migrates your mainframe infrastructure and applications to a cloud platform like Microsoft Azure. In this stage, Astadia takes the transition beyond “lift and shift” to incorporate modern IDEs and managed code sets. Customers benefit from the fastest path to the cloud, significant cost savings and the ability to make use of the latest technology and innovations on the cloud.

Once applications are free from the mainframe, Astadia then focuses on long-term growth with ongoing optimization and modernization in Stage 3. It’s here that application re-architecting plays a key role, alongside CI/CD, Automated Testing, and other modern services.

A Winning Combination

With FastPass+, my family and I were able to eliminate the wait and long lines and heighten our Disney World experience.

So too with FASTPaaS, your organization can eliminate business risk and heighten your mainframe migration experience.

Working together, Astadia and Micro Focus help organizations, like yours, engineer an efficient and cost-effective journey to Microsoft Azure.

The FASTPaaS methodology combines decades of expertise in successful mainframe migration by breaking down silos to ensure a more efficient transition of legacy applications and data to a flexible, scalable, cloud-based infrastructure on Microsoft Azure. This guarantees businesses have a proven and easy pathway to modernization, without complex processes or heavy capital investments.

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