Sarcouncil Journal of Engineering and Computer Sciences

Abstract: The digital transformation of enterprise computing infrastructure requires IBM i platforms to evolve from isolated legacy systems to integrated parts of modern digital ecosystems. This transformation is intended to meet the critical challenge of preserving decades of proven business logic and institutional knowledge while making possible contemporary capabilities like API-driven integration, DevOps automation, and cloud deployment flexibility. Anchored by the Strangler Application pattern, the modular evolutionary approach allows for incremental porting of monolithic applications to microservices architectures without impairing operational continuity. API enablement is a basic enabler for exposing IBM i functionality to mobile applications, cloud services, and partner systems as RESTful interfaces and event-driven architectures. A combination of distributed version control systems, continuous integration pipelines, and modern development environments changes the repetitive IBM i development processes into agile collaborative development processes in accordance with industry best practices. The cloud migration strategies that include lift-and-shift migrations, hybrid frameworks, as well as fully offered services offer companies the versatile mechanisms to harness elastic capacity and geographic dispersion, besides catering to security and compliance requirements. Such a combination of technological and methodological innovations establishes a sustainable architecture of evolutionary change that successfully strikes a balance between innovation needs and the needs of operational stability to keep the IBM i platforms strategic to enterprise architectures and support digital business agendas.