Cloud migration

Astadia Migrates Air Force Mainframe to Microsoft Azure

Astadia, a mainframe modernization company, said it has completed a large-scale migration of a mission-critical Air Force maintenance system to Microsoft Azure.

The project’s objective is to modernize the Air Force’s Unisys mainframe, which the Government Accountability Office identified as one of the most critical legacy systems that required modernization, Astadia said Tuesday.

In a 2019 report, GAO said the mainframe was too expensive to maintain and suffered from aging hardware, potential security vulnerabilities and a lack of personnel qualified to provide long-term support.

Astadia said that the Unisys mainframe runs the Air Force’s most important information systems and must be maintained in spite of its age and high maintenance costs.

The company added that the Azure cloud environment offers economic and data adaptability benefits for large organizations still relying on old-generation platforms, including mainframe computing environments.

With the mainframe now in the cloud, the Air Force is expected to achieve annual operating cost savings of over 80 percent while improving technicians’ capacity to respond to changing needs and requirements.

The modernization project has also opened up digital transformation opportunities in predictive maintenance, artificial intelligence, machine learning, advanced data analytics, security, monitoring and disaster recovery, according to Astadia.

The company said it has developed new efficiency-focused tools and project management methodologies based on past Unisys and IBM modernization projects.

Astadia is a system integration company headquartered in Boston, Massachusetts. The company specializes in migrating IBM and Unisys mainframe applications and databases to distributed and cloud platforms. Astadia said it has completed more than 200 mainframe modernization projects.