5 Reasons Why You Need to Migrate from Sybase

September 27, 2021

For those of you who may not know, Sybase also known as SAP Adaptive Server Enterprise (ASE), announced the end of mainstream maintenance (EoMM) by 2025. To give some background on Sybase, it was a leading developer of enterprise application for the new millennium. It had been supplying its customers with data management, business intelligence, and analytics software solution since 1984. SAP ASE promised to handle massive columns of data and thousands of concurrent users to accelerate the growth of their new data-driven business applications. Their proposition was to drive value with a faster, more efficient transactional system that is designed to meet demands of the digital economy. Features included improved performance of transaction processing, business continuity and data security, and various deployments options for innovation. The announcement of EoMM left dedicated customers in confusion about what this meant for their business moving forward.

The EoMM presents the opportunity for organizations to migrate to the cloud. One of the main reasons businesses today are migrating to the cloud is to reduce IT investment and overhead costs. Switching to Azure SQL database for instances, cuts down your IT costs by removing the need for expensive data handling software. Resulting in never having to incur any maintenance costs for servicing and updates moving forward. Secondly, scalability. The concept of switching to the cloud means your company has a better ability to scale up or down based on your IT requirements and business plan. Cloud computing is another valuable new option when migrating to the cloud. By using the cloud, business can save money, delivery value more quickly, access a broad range of technologies, scale their computing capacity up and down as need to meet demand, and shift more of their focus to provide business value.

Organizations who’ve already migrated over to the cloud are already witnessing greater value and capitalizing on endless possibilities. Here are five reasons why experts strongly urge the migration from Sybase to an SQL based cloud environment.

No Signs of Sybase Innovations

Sybase’s ASE platform has been around for over 10 years, and with its longevity, you can expect significant technological improvements such as greater support for the application. However, the last major release from Sybase was back in 2015, showing that there are no plans for innovation around Sybase products, just incremental improvements of existing features. It seems that SAP does not have the technology required to compete with leading competitors. For existing customers, Sybase doesn’t offer any migration tools so you’ll have to do everything manually, which can pose some serious problems down the line. The risk of compatibility issues with another program is only one of those possibilities.

Security + Data Breaches

Sybase mainstream maintenance is the phase in which fixes to known issues are released. Once this phase ends, only security-related patched may be released. If not migrated by 2025, you could find yourself with an unsupported database that is not only at risk of having unknown issues but also security vulnerabilities. A recent study showed that data breaches in 2021 have reached over $6.8 million.

According to SAP, although the EoMM for ASE clients will occur in 2025 paid support for Sybase will remain available years beyond the 2025 EoMM deadline but will cease to release new patches or enhancements for their platform. While the availability of this narrow scope of maintenance will provide users with some insurance, the reliability of the platform will suffer in a few impactful ways.

Data Quality Management

In the past year, Sybase has been under investigation for data issues, whether it is a lack of backups, slow database performance, or even data integrity issues. Customer feedback have been demanding more attention from SAP. While all those demands have been met to some degree by SAP delivering new features around database performance and usability in the last several years. These new features are not always compatible with Sybase systems.

SAP Update + Community

SAP published EoMM dates for all their on-premises product versions and has been doing so for decades as part of the SAP release and maintenance strategy. These dates represent a commitment to their customers on how long they can depend on that specific version of the product to remain in mainstream maintenance before they need to consider moving to another version. Despite having thousands of active Sybase deployment, the public interest and activity on user forms have been little to none these past years. Nor has there been any technical news or features on the research site. A state-of-the-market survey of businesses using Sybase/ASE facing the 2025&2025 EoMM deadline reveals that 75% of them are planning to migrate from Sybase/ASE within the next five years.

Organizational Drive to Leverage Modern Architectures and Tools

Addressing and preparing for business challenges entail not only agility, but also how organizations face on-going business issues and ensure their data architecture can support their future business strategy. By assessing your organization’s preparedness as well as implementing best practices and state-of-the-art technology, your organization will be ready to adopt a modern architecture. Modern IT architecture creates vast advantages for businesses by offering new and improved ways of achieving goals such as: shorter time to market, improved responsiveness, cost predication and improved security. Your organization can gain by adopting state-of the art modern architecture technology.

The benefit to migrate off Sybase to a SQL server now is having the ability to maintain the stability and scalability of this customer-facing platform. With Sybase scheduled to go out of the server by 2025, migrating to an alternative Relational Database Management System is essential to your business. Migrating today can mean minimal disruption to the existing production system, zero data loss, and removing any inconvenience to your customers.

How can Zelusit help?

Zelusit’s experts have helped clients using Sybase Relational Database Management system take a conservative approach to move from Sybase on-prem to SQL in the cloud in one go. We start off with a discovery exercise, analyzing the existing database and applications to understand the source data system and the current mapping from source to target systems.

With Sybase scheduled to go out of support, migrating to an alternative Relational Database Management System is essential to the client’s business, and we plan and execute migration on time and within budget. Through Zelusit experience and proven methodology we can implement with minimal disruption to the existing production system, zero data loss, and without any inconvenience to their customers. The new environment is designed with a deliverability of 99.97% or better.

The migration to on-premises SQL Server will also serve as a conservative step towards a client’s move to the cloud in the future. This project will make it easier and faster for the client to migrate to the cloud by simply porting their SQL Server instance across to Synapse or SQL Server Managed instance.