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.

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