A fresh approach to COBOL migration: Successful modernisation starts with the data!
For decades, companies worldwide have relied on COBOL applications to reliably handle business-critical processes. Banks, insurance companies, public authorities and industrial firms process billions of data records every day on mainframe systems. However, with digital transformation, demands are increasing: legacy systems must integrate with modern data platforms, cloud environments, business intelligence solutions and AI applications.
Many modernisation projects focus on migrating the COBOL source code. In practice, however, it is clear that the real key to success is not the programme code, but the underlying data. File formats that have evolved over decades, COBOL copybooks, EBCDIC character sets, COMP-3 fields, and VSAM and ISAM files place high demands on secure and loss-free data migration.
This is exactly where IRI CoSort comes in!
The powerful data management platform IRI CoSort has been helping organisations for decades to automatically analyse, transform and migrate legacy data to modern target systems. Existing COBOL copybooks serve as a metadata basis, enabling data structures to be interpreted and processed without the need for time-consuming redefinition. Complex data types such as packed decimal (COMP-3), binary fields or variable-length records are reliably recognised and converted into modern data formats.
A successful COBOL migration involves far more than mere data conversion!
During processing, data can be validated, cleansed, standardised and – where necessary – masked in accordance with the GDPR or other compliance requirements. Multiple processing steps, which would otherwise require different tools, can be consolidated into a single, powerful pipeline using IRI CoSort. This reduces complexity, shortens project timelines and minimises the risk of data loss or inconsistencies.
The modernised data can then be transferred directly into relational databases, data warehouses, data lakes or cloud platforms. It can also be prepared for use in business intelligence, advanced analytics or artificial intelligence. This enables organisations to lay the foundations for utilising information accumulated over decades securely and efficiently within future IT architectures.
With its high performance, broad support for historical mainframe data formats and the combination of data integration, transformation, data quality and data protection, IRI CoSort offers a data-centric approach to the modernisation of COBOL systems. Rather than focusing exclusively on the migration of source code, the emphasis is on the long-term preservation and optimal utilisation of a company’s most valuable resource – its data.
Your benefits at a glance:
Successful COBOL modernisation is not just about migrating existing applications to a new environment. It lays the groundwork for making corporate data – accumulated over decades – usable for the digital future in a secure, high-performance and sustainable manner. With IRI CoSort, this step can be achieved efficiently, transparently and without unnecessary detours!
Efficiency meets experience: For more than four decades, our software solutions have been supporting companies in data management and data protection – technologically leading, reliable in productive use and applicable across all industries.
In use since 1978: Numerous well-known companies, service providers, financial institutions and state and federal authorities are among our long-standing customers.
Maximum compatibility: Our software supports both classic mainframe platforms (Fujitsu BS2000/OSD, IBM z/OS, z/VSE, z/Linux) and modern open system environments such as Linux, UNIX derivatives and Windows.