By Claire Connor, Senior Mainframe Solution Architect, Ensono Why the mainframe may be your organization’s most underappreciated asset—and what you can do to upgrade its status.
Headlines over the last decade have focused heavily on the cloud and its benefits to businesses. But with their undisputed track record for security and resilience, mainframes continue to be a vital asset for many enterprises.
Despite the growing adoption of cloud alternatives, the mainframe market size is estimated to be worth $5.3 billion (USD) in 20231, a very healthy outlook. And IBM’s April 2022 launch of its IBM z16 is a sign of strong continued investment in mainframe technology. Because mainframes get on with their work with the bare minimum of fuss, they can be taken for granted, and not considered central to a digital transformation strategy. But given its proven, highly secure capability to handle the enormous quantity of data demanded by today’s business-critical applications, the mainframe warrants serious consideration as a core part of your IT strategy. In fact, with the right approach this reliable workhorse can become one of the strategic superstars of your IT environment.
Three ways to unlock the strategic potential of your mainframe
Of course, even the best equipment can be improved. To get the most from the mainframe and maximize its capabilities, modernization is essential. The term “modernization” encompasses several different approaches to enhancing the performance and value of your mainframe. Which one you take should be informed by a clear understanding of your business priorities and goals. What is the business trying to achieve? Does the mainframe currently deliver value against these objectives? If not, why not? What do you need from your business applications, and therefore, where are they best placed to sit? And what are the future opportunities?
Senior business and IT leaders have an opportunity to gain a competitive advantage by applying the following lens when considering whether and how to leverage the mainframe to support their strategy.
For some companies, a strategy of optimization is the best path forward: assessing the current environment and upgrading hardware, software and operational processes as needed to improve security, efficiency and performance. This relatively straightforward modernization approach can yield tremendous upside including significant ROI, operational stability, enhanced SLAs, and greater visibility and insight across your entire estate. Other organizations benefit from introducing more significant innovation into their mainframe environment.
While it may not be a word typically associated with the mainframe, innovation on this platform is both possible and hugely impactful. There are several exciting areas of mainframe innovation driving powerful business results today:
Modern capability development – Traditionally, mainframe issues have been addressed with bespoke code written to fix specific problems. This perpetuates the siloed position of the environment, drives up costs and limits access, innovation and productivity. A modernized mainframe presents an opportunity to replace homegrown code with open-source, platform agnostic programming languages like Python. This makes the mainframe far easier to maintain, and ensures your organization stays agile with changing strategic business needs, market trends and customer requirements by:
Enabling rapid, cross-platform application development
Automating any repeatable workflow or process
Reducing time spent on configuration management and software updates
Ecosystem connectivity and communication – Enabling the mainframe to seamlessly communicate and collaborate with other elements in the ecosystem is critical to maintaining business speed and velocity. Modern integrations and interfaces such as web-based and mobile applications and APIs allow mainframe and non-mainframe assets to access each other quickly and securely. Here again, these modern applications are easy and intuitive for developers to consume on any platform, as opposed to proprietary coding methods which limit accessibility and increase costs.
Whichever approach you take, a modernized mainframe will deliver growth, increased productivity, decreased costs, improved customer experience, increased strategic agility moving forward, increased accessibility and ultimately, true business differentiation. As your business goals and needs change, your modernization journey can evolve to support them.
Risks are an inherent aspect of any business transformation, and mainframe modernization involves its own unique set. While most risks can be managed by setting realistic, achievable project milestones, it’s important to know upfront what you may be facing, including:
Staffing availability – The mainframe workforce is aging, and those who cycle out are not being replaced at an equivalent rate. Assess the tenure and capabilities of your current staff and build a plan to address any current or anticipated gaps. This could include supporting internal resources with training to broaden their knowledge and skills, or partnering with a service provider who can augment your workforce with their own mainframe experts.
Operational stability – Any change from X to Y is going to introduce some level of disruption into your steady state operations. This can be a particular point of vulnerability if you are saddled with technical debt due to inconsistent maintenance or frequently changed requirements, or if you’ve been operating in an environment with limited resources whose expertise and attention have been spread thin.
Culture management – Getting people to adapt to a new and different way of working can be a bumpy road. To help minimize negative impacts of a modernization project, the business should take a holistic approach: everyone from infrastructure or development teams should be brought along to understand the goal of the changes and how they will be affected and be responsive to any questions or concerns they raise.
Once you have a clear picture of the opportunities, requirements, risks and mitigations of transformation, you need to make a decision: Is the mainframe going to be part of the enterprise infrastructure going forward, or not? Given the inevitable unknowns on the other side of a clear “yes” or “no” answer, deferring this decision to an indefinite future point can feel like a safe, do-no-harm path forward. But standing still carries its own risks—excess costs, operational disruptions, security vulnerabilities, lost innovation and more—which can potentially be greater than the risks of decisive action.
To paraphrase Jeff Bezos, some decisions are reversible and some aren’t. Being comfortable with both making the decision to either embrace the mainframe as part of your go-forward strategy or leave it behind, and with accepting and responding to any unforeseen consequences of that decision, can free your business to move forward with energy, focus and a reinvigorated sense of purpose.
As the world continues to readjust in the wake of the global pandemic, digital transformation is at the heart of business strategy. Understanding how modernizing your mainframe can deliver more strategic value is essential. No longer “legacy” technology, a modernized mainframe can play a critical role in driving businesses into the next phase of growth, securing vital processes, enabling greater productivity and better business outcomes—in other words, a first-class citizen of your IT environment who more than earns its place alongside the technology stars.
