Modernizing outdated IT operations through a smooth migration to the cloud

Outdoor media company | Media

Business opportunity

A leading outdoor media company present in 31 countries globally adopted a cloud migration strategy to drive operational efficiency and modernize IT infrastructure and applications across its 25 business units. As a result, the company was tasked with migrating systems to its parent company’s chosen strategic cloud platform, Microsoft Azure.

In addition to unlocking cost and flexibility benefits, this was an opportunity for the company to reduce business risk. It was running key systems on outdated hardware and an operating system version that was no longer supported by the vendor.

Technical challenge

When the media company assessed its on-premises workloads, one potential major challenge emerged: the migration path for its IBM Power (AS/400) environment. This was running several business-critical applications, but the hardware was over a decade old. The company had growing concerns about its ability to obtain replacement parts. Equally, the IBM i operating system version used by the company was no longer supported by IBM, putting the company at risk of business disruption.

A more general issue was that IBM i runs only on the Power architecture rather than on the ubiquitous x86 architecture.

Our solution

Together, the media company and the Kyndryl Skytap on Azure team migrated its legacy IBM i Power workloads to the Azure cloud. This solution provides fully hosted and managed IBM Power hardware within the Azure cloud.

After completing initial testing and network configuration, the company used Kyndryl Skytap’s “clone to region” feature to activate the IBM Power system in its preferred Azure region. Following additional testing and tuning, the company was able to complete the full migration without incident. As part of the migration, the company upgraded its operating system to IBM i 7.4, which is supported by IBM.

The power of partnership

The media company’s seamless implementation of Kyndryl Skytap was supported by its close partnership with Microsoft and Kyndryl, whose consultants worked with the customer to fine-tune and test the system before the final migration.

What progress looks like

With its business-critical IBM i workloads now running on Kyndryl Skytap on Azure, the media company has eliminated the risk of legacy hardware and can continue modernizing its IT environment. Additionally, with Kyndryl Skytap features such as “live clone” and template, the company can quickly create Development and Testing (Dev/Test) dev/testand Ddisaster Rrecovery (DR) environments, supporting more agile IT operations.

Eliminated risk of business disruption associated with legacy systems
Seamlessly migrated to public cloud
Gained scalability and agility, streamlining IT operations

Anthony Atiye

Associate Director, Skytap on Azure

Kyndryl

Mayank Kumar

Technical Lead, Customer Technology Advisor

Kyndryl

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