Accelerating Cloud Database Migrations – The mLogica and STAR*M Automation Solution

Given the pace of innovation in the rapidly evolving digital world, enterprises must continually innovate to fend off competition. Nevertheless, one challenge continues to stand out: How do you modernize legacy systems without disrupting business as usual or putting the data at risk?

DB2 on the mainframe has long been an enterprise's core determinant. However, over time, these systems usually become a block to agility and scaling in the cloud-first era. Introducing mLogica, a distributed database migration leader with our breakthrough solution designed to simplify and secure the journey to migrate workloads to the cloud—STAR*M Distributed Workload Modernization.

Imagine a worldwide telecommunications conglomerate perpetually wrestling with hundreds of thousands of customers using its network that resides on a legacy system. These legacy systems, formerly at the forefront of technology, now prevent businesses from innovating and growing to new heights.

The story is the same across sectors. This problem applies to banks, government agencies, and manufacturers. Facing ever-increasing operational costs and a rapidly shrinking contracting budget, these organizations realize legacy systems will never be sustainable.

Nevertheless, modernization comes with associated risks. Downtime, data loss, and simply being too expensive to do well top the list of reasons many are still struggling to feel they can confidently take that first step down this journey. mLogica solves that problem by turning a challenge into an opportunity.

The key to mLogica's innovation is the STAR*M Distributed Workload Modernization. This solution leverages Gen-AI to enable non-disruptive modernization of distributed workloads and databases, addressing the above challenges effectively.

Key Features

• Full Automation: Automatically converts legacy workloads to your modern environment, reducing the chance of manual error.
• Improved Performance: Allows applications to take full advantage of cloud-native architectures.
• Interoperability: Supporting all public, private, and hybrid cloud platforms for seamless transition as a requisite.
• Risk mitigation: This ensures clear strategies are in place, minimizing downtime and data integrity issues during the migration process to near zero.

STAR*M enables companies to achieve not just migrations but also end-to-end transformations, delivering long-lasting and optimal solutions.

State Public School District: On-Premises to Cloud-Optimized

Faced with a crucial turning point in its technological revolution, one American school district had to move swiftly. Serving thousands of pre-K-to-12th-grade students, this district's wider goal to ready its pupils for a changing world was crippled by the limitations of its aging database system. The issue was obvious: the on-premise legacy SAP SQL Anywhere databases that needed to be more powerful and reliable to carry more significant burdens.

The Obstacles

As the world rapidly evolved, each unit kept up with its demands in incremental mode, and scalability became a neck-breaker, burdening the district databases. But it was the costs that hurt most—millions per year burned on licensing and maintenance, money that could instead be supporting student services. This additionally compounded the already challenging predicament of being saddled with technical debt, stunted innovation, and expensive operational overheads that claimed IT resources that would be better served focused on strategic imperatives.

District leaders, facing these challenges, took swift action to upgrade. They wanted to eliminate licensing and infrastructure costs, tap into the scalability and agility of the cloud, and provide predictability during what would be one very big change in a system that was critical to teaching staff, administration, and students.

The Journey to Transformation

The district chose mLogica and its STAR*M solution. The mLogica team utilized automation, machine learning, and GenAI capabilities and established a tactical phased approach for success.

This included a complete assessment of their legacy environment to initiate the process. All 890 databases were reviewed, and mapped dependencies were assessed to mitigate risks. The team then worked on a pilot migration, carefully yet swiftly migrating a diverse sample of databases to assess and catalog all the learnings.

Then, the large-scale migration started. It was a large project split into multiple phases to migrate the databases to the cloud, translate metadata, extract the data, and load it in AWS RDS PostgreSQL. mLogica conducted rigorous testing to confirm accuracy and performance, and using STAR*M as the engine for automation helped reduce human error, increase output speeds, reduce the cost-of-service delivery, etc.

The Results

The results of the migration effort were more than satisfactory:

• Savings: Millions of dollars in annual SAP licensing fees were saved by transitioning to a new solution.
• Scalability: The cloud-based system has been scaled to meet the needs of educators and students.
• Solution: The district removed the technical debt, and users had access to advanced tools enabled by innovation unlocked in response to their actual needs.
• Better Performance and Security: AWS, with its strong infrastructure, is a highly reliable and secure component that encounters unmatched performance.
• In addition, mLogica provided uninterrupted post-migration support 24/7 to ensure a smooth transition coupled with immediate problem resolution via its dedicated help desk.

A New Chapter

This successful transformation allowed the school district to move away from legacy system technology and focus its resources on what it does best: educating upcoming generations. With a highly scalable, agile, and cost-efficient database environment in place, they will be able to respond even faster to any upcoming demands, such as new innovative products.

mLogica has a long history of performing some of the most complex and nuanced migrations out there. They were tasked with converting hundreds of thousands of lines of intricate SQL code to something that could run in the cloud.

If you are a CIO, solutions architect, or in any decision-making role about IT infrastructure, you are aware of the stakes involved. Legacy system modernization is mandatory in the quickly changing business landscape.

So, what makes mLogica stand out?

• Faster and Easier: Automated migrations speed up timings with lower costs.
• Scale: Cloud architectures to help innovate in AI, ML, and analytic workloads
• Business Continuity – Reduced risks lead to business continuity without any glitches

Public sector organizations face unique challenges when modernizing their IT infrastructures, whether in education, healthcare, or government agencies. This is where Carahsoft Technology Corp., the Trusted Government IT Solutions Provider^™, and mLogica collaborate to deliver unparalleled modernization solutions.

Founded in 2004 and headquartered in Reston, Virginia, Carahsoft specializes in solutions for cybersecurity, multi-cloud, DevSecOps, artificial intelligence, and more, catering to critical public sector needs. Together with mLogica, a leader in automated migrations of distributed and mainframe workloads, they provide transformative modernization services with unmatched efficiency.

As top-tier migration partners for AWS, Google, Microsoft, and Oracle, mLogica and Carahsoft’s joint initiatives have enabled public sector agencies to achieve risk-free, automated migrations to the cloud. These solutions deliver transformations at one-third the time and half the cost of manual approaches, ensuring scalability, cost-efficiency, and agility for organizations looking to innovate.

It’s a choice between embarking on the path to modernization or remaining with the status quo. STAR*M eliminates uncertainty in even the most complex migrations, offering advanced tools and expert guidance from mLogica.

Are you ready to transform your legacy systems into cutting-edge, cloud-native platforms? Discover how mLogica’s STAR*M can guide your business in the right direction.

This blog is more than just a story about modernization—it’s a source of actionable insights for companies ready to step confidently into the future.