Mainframe modernization maximizes value
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Solution
- Cloud
Enabling Enterprise Agility & Resilience with a Robust Cloud Strategy
Highlights
- Businesses running on legacy platforms are held back by technologies that limit growth and prevent them from accessing incremental business value.
- Sluggish integration time with new features, inflexibility to launch experimental workloads, and rising cost of ownership drive businesses to modernize their legacy mainframes.
- Mainframe modernization to hyperscaler public cloud platforms leads to higher productivity, stronger business sustainability, and faster time-to-market.
In this article
In this article
Mainframes still mainstream
Millions of business transactions requiring huge volumes of data are executed on mainframe platforms.
New processors and chipsets in conjunction with native virtualization, and container technologies have enabled enterprises to continue to leverage their existing investment on mainframes. Messaging solutions for message exchange between mainframe applications and services hosted on cloud, and solutions that integrate mainframe workloads and data on-premise with digital systems of engagement on public cloud have helped modernization efforts. At operational and tactical levels, mainframe utility pricing models, license models, repurposing and processing through APIs will always trigger enterprises to continuously invest in the optimization effort of mainframe application workloads.
Longer time to market, inadequate skills, increase in total cost of ownership, and inflexibility to rapidly launch experimental workloads to support innovation plague enterprises that have mainframe footprint with legacy application portfolios.
On the other hand, enterprises that are not risk averse, go the modernization way riding on cloud-native services. They enjoy higher productivity and business agility, stronger business sustainability, faster time-to-market, and lower operating costs.
10R guidance framework
A comprehensive 10R guidance framework can help enterprises to apply best practices and categorize the mainframe application portfolios.
This framework acts on key input parameters such as mainframe application portfolio’s business value, technology obsolescence, life-cycle stage, roadmap plan and business criticality levels. It also helps categorize the mainframe application portfolios that are required to be:
- Rationalized and consolidated to eliminate overlapping and redundant functionalities
- Retained, optimized, and repurposed so that its components (service, data, etc.) can be leveraged by other digital and cloud application systems (SaaS, IaaS, and PaaS)
- Retired as per application roadmap plan, technology obsolescence state or legacy status and unused business application functionalities
- Replaced with SaaS solutions
- Rehosted to public cloud leveraging mainframe rehosting and emulation solutions (for instance, Micro Focus solution on AWS and Azure cloud platforms). Workloads with less dependencies on the mainframe ecosystem should be rehosted on priority.
- Re-factoring and remediating application code with minimum effort
- Re-platforming databases on cloud platform
- Re-architected, re-engineered, and re-designed into loosely coupled microservices and containerized modules coupled with APIs, which need to be deployed on cloud leveraging IaaS and PaaS solutions.
Transitioning to cloud
Enterprises can adopt a multi-horizon approach to successfully modernize mainframe applications.
Horizon 1: Building the digital core
- Rationalize mainframe business application workloads.
- Repurpose mainframe workloads and data to integrate with the ecosystem of digital systems of engagements. For example, banks can open access controls to their credit check partner’s API systems for leveraging their mainframe data about their customer’s loan history details through OpenAPI banking initiative.
- Optimize mainframe resource consumption. For instance, retailers can optimize application design, database access calls, and so on for handling seasonal sales workloads.
Repurposing assets and optimization of mainframe consumption will benefit enterprises while embarking on modernizing and migrating applications to a public cloud during Horizons 2 and 3.
Horizon 2: Transforming business models
- Rehost by leveraging vendor’s mainframe solutions and refactor mainframe workloads into cloud platform as part of quick win strategy.
- Replace mainframe COTS with the appropriate and equivalent SaaS solutions.
Horizon 3: Building sustainable businesses
- Re-architect mainframe workloads for cloud-native solutions using serverless, containers, microservices, APIs, and PaaS technology.
Stats
Holistic modernization
Modernization and cloud transformation help reduce operational as well as upgrade costs.
The approach to mainframe modernization should cover end-to-end phases such as advisory, strategy definition, discovery, assessment, design, implementation, and change management. A key steppingstone for mainframe modernization journey is systems integrators and service providers who work jointly with key business, IT, and finance stakeholders of enterprises for creating:
- A business case, which highlights tangible and intangible benefits of options for migrating mainframe application in phases. Defining self-funding model as an investment strategy, where the cost savings realized through execution can be positioned as investments for mainframe modernization initiatives.
- Value measurement framework for tracking the business value realized through a series of mainframe modernization and cloud migration initiatives.
Crawl-walk-run approach
We recommend an overarching crawl-walk-run approach for successful mainframe application modernization.
Crawl: Execute the pilot application modernization and migration for less critical applications.
Walk: Execute the first wave of business-critical applications within line of business (early adopters).
Run: Establish and run the industrialized factory model for modernization for executing parallel projects for cluster of mainframe applications across line of business and business segments.
Customization is key
Mainframe modernization efforts should be tailor-made to specific industries.
Automated discovery, migration, and design tools, coupled with industrialized factory approach, are the need of the hour to address the scale, complexity, and volume of application components for accelerating the delivery of legacy application modernization and cloud transformation. Tracking business value realization through value measurement framework is the key to measure the success of application modernization and cloud migration initiatives. With this approach in mind, finding the right partner to drive the complexity of the enterprise transformation is key for accomplishing business objectives. Evolving legacy application workloads from mainframe to cloud with a risk-adjusted approach enables the enterprise to thrive as they meet their purpose-led growth business objective.
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