Mainframe modernisation – from legacy to cloud
October 27, 2021
RESEARCH REPORT
In brief
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.
Mainframe modernisation – from legacy to cloud
This video is a visual representation of the benefits of modernising your mainframe and details the 7Rs framework.
View TranscriptMainframes 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 7 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.
Retire
the applications you no longer need.
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.
Reimagine the business
Use domain-driven design to rewrite the application to support modern business processes and technology modernisation.
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4% of respondents answered “No challenges faced”
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