Thinking About Moving IBM i To The Cloud? Don’t Start With The Quote

August 31, 2026 Josh Patterson

We get asked a deceptively simple question all the time: “What would it cost to move our IBM i environment to the cloud?”

It sounds like a pricing question. Usually, it isn’t. Before we start talking about cores, memory, storage, or monthly costs, there’s a much more important question to answer: Why are you considering cloud in the first place?

Maybe your Power server is approaching a refresh. Maybe your data center contract is ending. Maybe an experienced IBM i administrator is retiring. Maybe your disaster recovery strategy no longer meets the business’s needs. Or perhaps your organization has adopted a broader cloud-first strategy and IBM i is now part of that conversation.

Those are very different business problems, and they shouldn’t automatically lead to the same cloud architecture.

Cloud Should Be The Result, Not The Starting Point

The IBM Power cloud market has changed significantly. Organizations have more options than ever for running IBM i and AIX workloads outside their own data centers. That’s good news, but having more options also makes it easier to start with the destination instead of the requirement.

Should you move to a managed private cloud or IBM Power Virtual Server? Should IBM i stay where it is while disaster recovery moves to the cloud? Does a hybrid architecture make more sense? How does the company’s AWS, Azure, VMware, or broader cloud strategy affect the decision?

Those are architecture questions, not product questions. At Lightedge, we believe cloud should be the result of the architecture conversation, not the beginning. Before deciding where an IBM Power workload belongs, we need to understand what the organization is trying to accomplish.

Start With The Business Driver

When a customer tells us they want to move IBM i to the cloud, one of our first questions is simply: Why now? The answer tells us a lot.

A hardware refresh creates one type of decision. A datacenter exit with a fixed deadline creates another. An IBM i skills shortage may mean the underlying challenge isn’t infrastructure at all – it’s finding the people to manage it. A resiliency problem could lead somewhere else entirely.

If the business says, “We cannot tolerate more than 15 minutes of data loss and need to be operational within two hours,” that requirement should drive the architecture. Simply moving production to a cloud environment does not automatically solve disaster recovery.

The same is true for a cloud-first mandate. “Cloud first” doesn’t have to mean “move everything.” The right answer may be to move production, move DR, move both, or leave part of the environment exactly where it is today. The technology decision becomes much clearer once you understand the business problem.

Understand The Workload You Actually Have

Once we understand why an organization is considering a change, then we can look at the workload. This is another place where cloud conversations can go sideways because the hardware you own today does not necessarily tell us what you need in the cloud.

A Power10 with a certain number of processors installed doesn’t mean the cloud environment needs an identical configuration. We want to understand actual processor utilization, memory requirements, storage capacity and performance, operating system levels, growth patterns, backup requirements, and application behavior. We also need to understand when the workload peaks. An IBM i environment processing month-end financials or handling a seasonal order spike may behave very differently during those periods than it does on an average Tuesday afternoon.

At Lightedge, that discovery process is an important part of how we design an IBM Power cloud environment. Rather than simply recreating the customer’s existing hardware configuration in the cloud, we look at the workload itself and design around what it actually requires – today and as the business changes.

As one Lightedge IBM i Cloud customer put it: “They were responsive to all our inquiries, and even helped us quantify what we needed in support of building our business case to get things going internally.”

Good cloud architecture starts with understanding the workload, not simply recreating the existing server somewhere else.

IBM i Rarely Lives Alone

This may be one of the most overlooked parts of an IBM Power cloud decision. The IBM i might run the core ERP or business application, but what connects to it?

Today’s IBM Power environments commonly interact with Windows and Linux systems, VMware, public cloud platforms, SaaS applications, APIs, file transfers, reporting tools, security platforms, users, customers, and business partners. Moving IBM i without understanding those dependencies can create problems with latency, network connectivity, application performance, security, and cost.

That’s why the question shouldn’t just be: “Where should IBM i run?” It should be: “What architecture best supports the entire workload?”

For many organizations, the answer will increasingly be hybrid. IBM i may run in one environment while applications consuming its data run somewhere else. Production and disaster recovery may live in different locations. AWS or Azure may be part of the application strategy even though the core system of record remains on IBM Power.

The objective isn’t to force every workload into one cloud. It’s to make the different pieces work together.

Decide What You Still Want To Own

Another question sometimes gets lost in the infrastructure discussion: What does your team actually want to manage?

Moving IBM i to the cloud removes the responsibility of owning physical hardware, but it doesn’t necessarily remove the operational responsibility for the environment. Someone still needs to think about monitoring, operating system management, patching, backups, security, high availability, disaster recovery, capacity, troubleshooting, and ongoing optimization.

For some organizations, maintaining that expertise internally makes sense. For others, transferring more of that responsibility to a managed services provider is one of the primary reasons they are considering cloud in the first place.

That distinction matters when comparing options and pricing. Two cloud proposals can look similar on paper while providing very different operating models.

Don’t Treat DR As An Add-On

We also encourage customers to talk about resiliency during the initial architecture discussion, not after production has already been designed. Where will the recovery environment live? How will data be replicated? What are the actual RPO and RTO requirements? Who owns the recovery process? Is there a documented runbook? How often is recovery tested?

And perhaps most importantly: Can the business recover, or does it simply have a second copy of the data?

At Lightedge, we see backup, disaster recovery, and production architecture as parts of the same conversation. A cloud migration is an opportunity to improve resiliency, not simply relocate the existing environment.

Think Beyond The Next Hardware Refresh

Perhaps the biggest mistake organizations can make is solving only for today. If you are evaluating a move to the cloud because a Power server is due for refresh, use the opportunity to look further ahead.

What does the business expect from IBM i over the next five years? Will the environment grow? Will applications be modernized? Will more services move to AWS or Azure? Will AI require new ways to access IBM i data? Is the organization concerned about IBM i skills and succession planning? Are acquisitions or data center changes likely?

You don’t need perfect answers to all of those questions, but you should build an architecture that can adapt as the answers change.

A Better Place To Start

So, if you are considering moving IBM i to the cloud, don’t start by asking for a quote. Start with seven questions:

Why are we considering cloud now?
What business problem are we trying to solve?
What does the workload actually require?
What systems and applications depend on it?
What are our real resiliency requirements?
What do we want to continue managing ourselves?
Where does this environment need to be in five years?

This is how we approach IBM Power cloud conversations at Lightedge.

We support IBM Power environments across managed cloud and hybrid architectures, including connectivity to public cloud platforms and the surrounding infrastructure IBM i workloads depend on. But the goal isn’t to make every customer fit the same architecture. It’s to understand the workload, the business requirement, the operating model, and the long-term strategy – and then determine where that workload belongs.

Because the most important decision isn’t whether IBM i can move to the cloud. It can.

The real decision is what you want the move to accomplish.

To learn more about how Lightedge helps organizations evaluate, migrate, and manage IBM Power environments across cloud and hybrid architectures, visit lightedge.com/IBM.

Josh Patterson is vice president of Hybrid Enterprise Solutions at Lightedge, helping organizations develop IBM Power strategies that span managed cloud, public cloud, hybrid infrastructure, resiliency, and modernization.

This content is sponsored by Lightedge.

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