Modernizing the Legacy Application-Mainframe

Mainframe technology providers are refusing to be left in the dust in a digital modern world where speed is everything, and everything is moving to the cloud. While a majority of the industry views mainframes as legacy, dated, old or irrelevant technology, many companies and initiatives are turning their focus to modernizing the mainframe.

 Top priorities for organizations include application availability, modernization, cost reduction, data privacy and security. The mainframe’s strengths lies in its ability to provide security, stability, availability and scalability to core parts of our society such as banking, transportation, healthcare, finance and insurance, according John Mertic, director of program management for the Open Mainframe Project at the Linux Foundation.

“For companies all over the world, the power of the mainframe is critical to the success of their enterprise transformations. As they transform toward cloud deployment models, many rely on the traditional strengths of the mainframe to maintain secure, reliable, and scalable computing. And for good reason. For example, nearly 80 percent of all enterprise data is managed on the mainframe,” IBM’s GM for GTS infrastructure Phil Guido and GM of mainframe systems Greg Lotko.

Bringing the cloud and mainframe together

Many companies have a cloud-first attitude when it comes to their technologies; however, Compuware’s O’Malley believes this way of thinking is skewed. “It is a very odd perspective because it should be customer first. A governmental agency is citizen first. Your platform should only be chosen for your citizens or customers, and giving them the best experience possible,” he said.

O’Malley explained there doesn’t have to be a mainframe versus cloud debate. The debate should be around how you optimize these platforms in the best and right ways. “Mainframe has its digital virtues that are unique to it and excel far greater than the cloud ever could or at least for the next decade, but there are things in the cloud that the mainframe can’t do,” he said.

For instance, the cloud is ideal for providing a cost-effective, shared resource environment for supporting “non-competitively differentiating workloads and applications like HR where the availability, performance and security requirements are far less stringent,” O’Malley explained.

In addition, the cloud and mainframe can be used together to create the best possible outcome.

“Increasingly, we are seeing organizations use the mainframe and the cloud together in a hybrid IT approach, and leveraging APIs to support multi-platform applications where certain components are best served by a system of engagement (like a web server), while back-end transaction processing is best handled by a mainframe,” said O’Malley. “This type of approach requires analyzing one’s own applications and determining the most cost-effective way to support them while still meeting availability and security requirements.”

The reason the mainframe excels with systems of record is because it provides businesses with a centralized, authoritative source to store and retrieve data, O’Malley explained. Businesses prefer newer technologies such as mobile, web and cloud when it comes to their systems of engagement, or systems that enable peer interaction such as emails, collaboration systems and social networking solutions because they are “designed to enable the creation and continuous improvement of digital customer experiences,” O’Malley said.

“These customer-facing experiences must be more than a pretty user interface, they must rely on other systems to complete the desired action,” O’Malley continued. “These actions, such as completing a credit card transaction or transferring money, occur for over thousands or even millions of customers, thus creating high-volume transactions that need to happen securely, in less than one second 24×7 without fail. This back-end work in support of the system of engagement is a system of record. The mainframe is purposely designed to best handle the performance, reliability and security requirements.”

Source: sdtimes.com