If legacy applications and the mainframe run your business, this could be shackling your growth. In fact, according to IDG, 67 percent of technology executives say that legacy systems are holding their businesses back. Cloud, on the other hand, has proven time and again to accelerate innovation. Still, many organizations have either been slowly moving to the cloud in increments or putting a move to the cloud off for the future. They figured they had plenty of time. Then the pandemic hit.
How well can your mainframe applications handle an increase in work-from-home employees, perhaps permanently, an increased demand for digital engagement from customers, and different ebbs and flows in eCommerce? Does your enterprise really have the appetite to find out?
The cloud offers the elasticity, reliability, and scalability needed for massive growth in digital business, workplaces, and social and healthcare. Modern applications that can easily be updated as customer demands and expectations change need the cloud. And only the cloud can deliver the fast access to data for the business, edge computing, and AI. Now is the perfect time to start moving your legacy applications and data completely to the cloud. Let’s look at why.
The mainframe is moving to a different place—one that is out of reach for most enterprises that have run their business applications on mainframes for decades. IBM has sold z/OS application software, including TADz, IWS, CICS IA, Fault Analyzer, File Manager and more to HCL. It ended support for COBOL V5, and COBOL V6.3 is only compatible with z15 (the latest z mainframe) and z/OS 2.4. IBM has also set its sights on Linux as an operating system and software designed for a more modern mainframe. In addition, IBM gave the z15 a 19-inch frame, which enables it to fit in a standard data center rather than one built specifically for previous editions of System z.
In short, IBM is sunsetting many mainframe technologies, and z/OS might be next. To top it all off, the COBOL programmers needed to maintain legacy applications are leaving and aging out, most never to return. This situation leaves many longstanding IBM mainframe customers at a crossroads—either invest in more, expensive IBM hardware or get off the IBM mainframe altogether.
Mainframe systems administrators manage core, highly customized systems for business units. These systems can contain millions of account schedules, hundreds of interfaces, thousands of concurrent users, millions of transactions and tens of millions of lines of code. If these mainframe business systems went down or crashed, it could be devastating. Their complexity makes them extremely difficult for a single person to understand, especially if the previous developers have left the company or if individual changes to the application weren’t properly documented.
In addition, the interdependence of all the different technologies implemented in a mainframe application makes it extremely difficult to make any changes or scale the application’s capabilities. Adding new features and functions is fraught with risk and peril, since even the smallest of changes can break the entire application, resulting in days, if not weeks of downtime. Without fully understanding how all of the aspects of a mainframe-dependent application are interconnected, nobody can predict what effect further changes will have on the application as a whole.
Migrating applications to the cloud with a legacy modernization platform and modern database management is one of the fastest ways improve your agility, innovation, and growth, preparing you for future disruptions or big changes.
The combination of a legacy modernization platform and a modern RDBMS provides customers and users with modern, easy-to-use, and high-performing apps—without starting from scratch—on a cloud infrastructure. This combination is a sensible option that enables organizations to take advantage of cloud’s benefits quickly and painlessly. No workload or application is left behind, and any future applications built in the new infrastructure can use legacy data that is easily accessed.
A legacy modernization platform is specially designed software for moving legacy mainframe applications from an IBM z/OS environment to the cloud of your choice quickly and cost-effectively. The migration from a monolithic mainframe to a multi-tiered cloud-ready architecture is easy and takes about 6 to 12 months, ensuring a rapid ROI. Supporting COBOL, Assembler, PL/I, Easytrieve, and more legacy technologies, it deploys on AWS, Azure, and Google Cloud environments.
To deliver extremely high performance, it enables horizontal and vertical scalability and allows for significant reduction in annual run costs for increased investment in innovation. There is no change to the end-user experience or application business logic. Organizations can use their existing workforce and skillsets. It supports both containers and virtualized environments.
A modern RDBMS provides an enhanced view of processing, managing and securing large-scale databases. It has the hyper-thread architecture, high-security database encryption, and multi-node parallel recovery required for a reliable, high-performance database. It scales with the cloud rather than proprietary database servers. It is highly compatible with Oracle, offers high availability with active-active clustering, high-performance transaction processing, and active or passive standby database capability.
A modern RDBMS reduces capital expenditures and operating expenses and simplifies licensing, while providing freedom of choice. Organizations only license the compute power associated to a given VM regardless of the amount of resources the database consumes.
Two TmaxSoft products, OpenFrame and Tibero, can provide the legacy modernization platform and RDBMS to help you usher in your 100-percent cloud era. When enterprises invest in both solutions, the result is a super-charged application and data infrastructure that runs flawlessly on the cloud.
To learn more, visit www.tmaxsoft.com.
Kelly McClure is the Vice President of Global Marketing for TmaxSoft. Her 20-year marketing career spans both Fortune 1000 companies and fast growth technology startups. Kelly is responsible for leading TmaxSoft’s marketing strategy. She is experienced in aligning marketing and sales, building relevant content and messaging and developing integrated lead generation campaigns. Before joining TmaxSoft, Kelly served as the Vice President of Marketing for 10th Magnitude and held senior marketing roles with DataStax, BMC Software and Micro Focus. Kelly has a bachelor’s degree from Purdue University and an MBA from Loyola University Chicago.