Debunking the Top 5 Myths About JD Edwards Cloud Migration

Migrating JD Edwards (JDE) to the cloud, especially when it’s resting on top of legacy IBM iSeries platforms (also known as AS/400) can be daunting and it can feel like a race against the clock.

Many organizations are still in the backseat, stuck on outdated perceptions that don’t align with the reality of today’s Oracle Cloud Infrastructure’s (OCI) capabilities

In this article, we’ll tackle the five most common myths we hear from IT leaders and business executives. We also aim to uncover the facts that could make all the difference in your modernization plans.

Let’s get going!

Myth #1: “The cloud is too expensive. The economics just don’t work for our business.”

This is one of the most common misconceptions holding back JD Edwards customers still running on IBM iSeries. At first glance, a monthly cloud bill can feel like “new” spending, but when you compare the total cost of ownership (TCO) over time, the numbers often favor cloud…significantly.

The reality: Multiple independent studies show that moving ERP workloads to the cloud can dramatically reduce infrastructure and operational costs.

• Organizations moving workloads to Oracle Cloud Infrastructure reduced their IT infrastructure costs significantly compared to running them on-premises, while improving performance and scalability.
• Reports that cloud applications deliver 4.01x the ROI of on-premises deployments by improving productivity, reducing downtime, and lowering IT labor requirements.

When we focus specifically on iSeries environments, the economics are even more compelling:

• Hardware refresh cycles for IBM i are costly and becoming harder to justify for an aging platform. A single midrange IBM i server replacement can run into six figures, not counting licensing or labor.
• Maintenance contracts rise every year as parts become scarce and certified vendors fewer in number.
• Specialized RPG talent is expensive, often requiring premium contract rates, and availability is shrinking fast.

By replatforming JD Edwards from iSeries to OCI, clients can avoid these sunk costs entirely, replacing unpredictable capital expenses with predictable, usage-based operational costs, and they only pay for what they use.

For organizations still on iSeries, the “cost” conversation is often skewed because the true expenses are hidden in line items that rarely get consolidated:

• Electricity, cooling, and physical data center space for aging hardware
• Unplanned downtime costs from hardware failures or performance issues
• Higher salaries or contractor rates for scarce RPG and iSeries system admins
• Deferred upgrade projects because of resource constraints

When these factors are fully accounted for, the long-term cost of staying on iSeries can easily surpass the investment in migration, especially when factoring in business agility and competitive positioning.

Myth #2: “We’ll lose control of our systems if we move to the cloud.”

This fear comes up in nearly every cloud migration conversation, and it’s especially common among JD Edwards customers with decades of hands-on experience managing their own infrastructure. The idea of “handing over” control to a third party feels risky.

The reality: Moving JDE to Oracle Cloud Infrastructure doesn’t mean giving up control. It means shifting control of low-value, high-effort tasks to a platform purpose-built to manage them, while retaining (and even enhancing) your ability to control what matters most.

With OCI, your organization still decides:

• Who can access your systems (role-based security and identity management)
• How your workflows and configurations are set up
• When to roll out functional changes or customizations
• What integrations remain and how they’re managed

At the same time, you gain:

• Enterprise-grade infrastructure management with SLAs of up to 99.995% availability
• Automated patching and updates, reducing security exposure without manual intervention
• Centralized monitoring and cost dashboards that provide real-time visibility into system performance, user activity, and spending

Instead of fighting fires, your IT team can focus on strategic projects like process automation, data analytics, or modernizing JDE modules, not maintaining aging servers.

In a recent report, almost half of organizations cited “lack of resources/expertise” as their top cloud challenge, not loss of control. This shows that organizations aren’t worried about “losing” their systems. They’re concerned with having the right skills to maximize them, which is exactly where partners like ITC step in.

For companies still on iSeries, “control” often means relying on a single admin or a very small team with deep but siloed knowledge of a platform that fewer people can support each year.

• If that resource is unavailable, or leaves the organization, the “control” you thought you had vanishes instantly.
• Hardware-level control also comes with unavoidable downtime for upgrades, maintenance, or unexpected failures.

By migrating to OCI, you keep strategic control over your ERP and business processes, while ensuring the underlying infrastructure is managed by a platform with far greater resiliency, redundancy, and security than you could cost-effectively build in-house.

Myth #3: “Our customizations will break if we move to the cloud.”

For JD Edwards customers, especially those running on iSeries, customizations are the lifeblood of daily operations. Many of these modifications have been refined over decades to reflect unique processes, industry requirements, and even regulatory needs. It’s no wonder IT leaders worry that a move to the cloud could cause them to lose this hard-earned functionality.

The reality: When you migrate JDE to OCI, your customizations don’t disappear. They move with you. In fact, cloud migration projects are designed to preserve and, where possible, optimize existing customizations:

• Migration paths ensure your current configuration is replicated in the new environment.
• OCI supports JDE workloads, maintaining compatibility with existing logic, forms, and reports.
• Modern tools allow you to decouple customizations from core JDE code, making them easier to maintain and upgrade without breaking functionality.
• OCI enables new integration opportunities through APIs and middleware, so your custom processes can connect to modern cloud apps without risky workarounds.

In Oracle’s own customer success studies, organizations that migrated heavily customized JDE systems to OCI reported smoother upgrades and significantly faster development cycles post-migration due to cleaner customization management.

On iSeries, customization management is often tightly coupled to the underlying RPG code and database structure, which can:

• Make upgrades extremely time-consuming or, in some cases, impossible without rework.
• Limit the ability to integrate with newer applications or automation tools.
• Create technical debt that increases every year as the talent pool for RPG and legacy JDE diminishes.

By replatforming to OCI, your customizations are not only preserved but also future-proofed, allowing them to evolve alongside JDE updates without the heavy lift you’ve grown accustomed to on iSeries.

Myth #4: “Migration means long downtime and major business disruption.”

Downtime is one of the biggest fears companies have when considering a move from iSeries to the cloud, especially for mission-critical systems like JD Edwards. The concern is valid: any ERP downtime can impact production, order fulfillment, payroll, and customer service. But the assumption that cloud migration equals weeks of disruption is outdated.

The reality: Modern migration methodologies and tools are built to minimize downtime, often reducing it to hours—not days or weeks.

How this is possible:

• Phased migration approaches allow for staged workload transfers, testing, and validation before final cutover.
• Parallel environments can be run in OCI while your iSeries remains operational, allowing for user training, UAT (User Acceptance Testing), and data validation without halting production.
• Automated replication tools synchronize your production data with the new environment in near-real time until go-live.

For iSeries shops, downtime is already a risk: hardware failures, power outages, and maintenance windows can cause unexpected disruptions that grow more frequent with aging infrastructure.

• Replacement parts and vendor support are harder to come by, stretching recovery times.
• Scheduled maintenance often requires full system downtime, which can’t always be neatly planned around business needs.

Migrating to OCI can actually reduce your total annual downtime because the platform is designed for high availability, redundancy, and disaster recovery. The migration itself can be orchestrated in a way that’s less disruptive than many iSeries hardware upgrades.

Myth #5: “We can keep running on iSeries indefinitely, there’s no rush.”

Many JD Edwards customers believe they can simply “wait it out” on iSeries, maintaining their current setup until a future budget cycle or leadership change. But the reality is that every year spent on aging infrastructure comes with rising operational risk, and one of the most urgent is the talent cliff.

The reality: The IBM i (iSeries) talent pool is shrinking fast.

• Fortra’s 2025 IBM i Marketplace Survey found that over 50% of IBM i professionals are age 56 or older, and less than 5% are under 35.
• COMMON, the largest IBM i user group, reports that fewer of new computer science graduates have experience with RPG or COBOL.
• Recruiting RPG developers or iSeries admins now often means paying premium contractor rates…if you can find them at all.

Even if your hardware is running smoothly today, losing your last experienced admin or developer can trigger:

• Missed backups and failed recovery procedures
• Delayed upgrades or patches
• Inability to troubleshoot or resolve production incidents quickly
• Higher dependency on costly third-party emergency support

For companies still running JDE on iSeries, the “wait and see” approach is a gamble.

• Hardware will age out.
• Vendor support will tighten.
• Talent will retire, often without a full knowledge transfer.

Migrating to OCI before this tipping point allows you to capture the knowledge of your current experts while they’re still available, replatform your environment under controlled conditions, and position your JDE system for sustainable support and growth.

The Bottom Line

Cloud migration myths can keep you tied to expensive, risky, and inflexible legacy setups. The truth is, OCI offers:

• Lower TCO and higher ROI
• Stronger governance and control
• Enterprise-grade security
• Flexible, phased migration strategies, without unnecessary prerequisites
• A clear path off iSeries and into a future-ready ERP environment

Ready to separate fact from fiction? Let’s talk about how we can de-risk your move and modernize your JD Edwards environment, before the myths cost you more than the migration ever could.