BrainBlog for IBM by Jason Bloomberg
A look at the various mainframe/cloud collaboration scenarios to see how best to provide value, save money and push digital transformation.
This is part two in a five-part series on mainframe modernization.
When you hear the phrase “modernize your mainframe applications with the cloud,” the first thing to come to mind is likely going to be migration. Not so fast. When you cut through the misconceptions, migrating off the mainframe is rarely the best approach.
Today’s mainframes are blisteringly fast, remarkably scalable and so unbelievably reliable that many mainframes in operation today have been running for decades with absolutely no downtime whatsoever.
That’s right. Not five 9’s. Not six 9’s. All the 9’s—we’re talking 100% uptime.
It’s no wonder two-thirds of the Fortune 100 relies upon its big iron for its mission-critical transactions. Banks, airlines, insurance companies, retailers—the list goes on. The global economy depends on mainframes, every minute of every day. But (and you knew there was a but), these same enterprises are in the midst of digital transformations. New economic and customer pressures are forcing them to innovate and rethink how they leverage technology to deliver customer value. Such transformations invariably include the cloud, and when it does, modernizing the mainframe soon enters the conversation.
While AWS, Microsoft Azure and other major cloud providers would love for all the enterprise workloads to run on their clouds, they realize that most mainframe customers would be better served by a mainframe/cloud collaboration strategy. IBM—the sole remaining mainframe vendor and a cloud provider in its own right—also champions bringing mainframes and clouds together to meet the modern digital needs of enterprises that have been depending on the mainframe platform for so many years.
Still think mainframe application modernization necessarily means migration? Let’s take a look at the various mainframe/cloud collaboration scenarios to see how best to provide value, save money, and most of all, achieve the customer-centric goals of digital transformation.
Read the entire BrainBlog here.
