With businesses evolving digitally in the face of rapidly evolving market, there have been significant demands on pre-existing legacy applications and data. IBM is helping its clients to meet these challenges by offering the tools and approaches to transform their business. As per a recent survey done by IBM Institute for Business Value (IBV), technology and business leaders say that the mainframes not only remain an important part of their organizations’ IT platforms but, it also plays a central motivating role in accelerating their digital transformations.
Digital transformation strategies motivate modernization of underlying systems and, more importantly, the applications that reside therein. The challenge, as usual, is deciding which applications to modernize, determining how to modernize, and identifying the destination for modernized application. The IBM Z organization is collaborating with AWS, Microsoft Azure, and IBM Cloud to support a hybrid cloud approach that leverages the core strengths and attributes of the IBM Z platform together with the extensive cloud services. A hybrid strategy that includes the IBM Z platform and cloud computing involves prioritizing each workload with an optimal platform so that each workload is in the right place and each of the various environments is handling what it does best. The Hybrid environment has become the leading architecture for businesses because it offers more value than relying on a single, public cloud.
Enterprises opting the hybrid approach should work proactively to integrate the mainframe into a hybrid cloud and find new ways to provide innovative and engaging experiences to satisfy existing customers, attract new prospects, and gain a competitive edge. Mainframes brings to the table an ultra-high resilient and secure environment, and Cloud computing gets the innovation that comes with a common DevOps operating model with shared tools and compliance processes. A new report by IBM says that a hybrid cloud approach that implements the latest IBM Z platform is designed to deliver more than 2.5 times the value of a public-cloud-only approach.
Kick-starting Modernization:
There can be several entry points from where an enterprise can commence their mainframe application modernization journey. It depends on their business needs, environment, challenges, and current processes; the one contributing the most to the immediate business value should be selected by the enterprise. Let us have a look at what all steps should be considered for the modernization:
Take up an adoptive, iterative, and incremental approach. As part of the plan to modernize mainframe applications by integrating new and existing environments, factor in your industry and workload attributes to create a thorough business plan and strategize your premeditated goals. Instead of a “big bang rewrite” that can be risky and affluent, leverage techniques such as coexistence architecture to steadily make the transition to the integrated hybrid architecture. With this approach, businesses can evolve and grow to continuously align with current and future business needs.
Assess your portfolio and build your roadmap. Assess your current state, examine the capabilities that define the role of the mainframe in your enterprise today and how those capabilities can tie into the greater hybrid cloud technology ecosystem in future. Prepare and plan a pool of your existing talent and resources and determine any potential skill gaps.
Leverage multiple modernization strategies. To build new capabilities enterprises should harness the value of the existing applications and data and make them available for digital consumption without changing them; by enabling easy access to existing mainframe applications and data, through APIs. Business areas in different enterprises may be intertwined in a way that the scope and demarcation of programs and transactions isn’t clear enough. DevOps processes and tools can be used to work on such tightly coupled applications.
A well-planned and accomplished hybrid strategy that includes the IBM Z platform and cloud can significantly reduce skills gaps; enable rapid innovation with an agile DevOps approach; making access to legacy applications and data easy, without significant changes; and optimize the costs of running or extending applications. This approach can maximize business agility and ROI.