Technology

Mainframe modernisation – from legacy to cloud

October 27, 2021

RESEARCH REPORT

In brief

More than 70 percent of Fortune 500 companies still run business-critical applications on mainframes.
High costs and inflexibility of mainframes can harm overall business agility and competitiveness.
New Accenture research finds 60% of enterprises in Australia-New Zealand (ANZ) have an active mainframe-to-cloud initiative in progress.
Primary benefits companies are pursuing are better integration of existing systems with other platforms, and increased agility of applications.

Mainframes have been the mainstay for mission-critical applications for over half-a-century. They offer compute horsepower, security, and reliability. And so, whilst cloud native development is the new normal, many enterprises’ critical business logic and data still reside on the mainframes.

Traditional mainframes impose many constraints for ANZ enterprises. There is its lack of agility, shrinking skills market, technology/architecture limitations, high cost of maintenance, and inflexible data architectures. Enterprises delaying the initiative to modernise their mainframes will find themselves lagging in 2-3 years time frame.

Modernisation of the mainframe can only be achieved through a multi year journey, which requires buy-in from senior stakeholders across the business and IT. This research discusses the need to modernise the mainframe systems and the efficient way to go about it, along with some successful use cases.

Ninety-three percent of the surveyed companies and considering moving to cloud in the next 2-5 years.

The 6 R framework to successful mainframe modernisation

Using a comprehensive methodology during the discovery phase can uncover the appropriate strategies needed to address the constraints posed by enterprises using mainframes.

Retain

for its useful life, remediate pain points, move development and test environments to a cloud infrastructure to increase agility and reduce costs.

Replace

with a package (including commercial-off-the-shelf [COTS] or SaaS) to improve functionality; extract and migrate data to reduce complexity and costs.

Rehost

to a less-expensive location without changing the code, to gain cost benefits without the risk that can result from programming language changes.

Re-platform

to a different platform/operating system, without changing the programming language, and thus permit applications to run in the cloud.

Refactor

legacy code to a modern programming language, using semi-automated tooling to mitigate risk relating to legacy skills, increase agility and cut costs.