Integrated Mainframe and Cloud Operations Emerge as Critical Success Factors for Achieving Digital Transformation Objectives
By Lane F. Cooper, Editorial Director, BizTechReports and Contributing Editor, CIO.com
Technological dogma will serve large organizations poorly as they move forward with ambitious digital transformation initiatives designed to create higher levels of agility and market responsiveness. As a result, it will be essential for business and technology leaders to establish coherent strategies for integrating decades worth of on-prem investments – especially on the mainframe – into their cloud adoption and modernization initiatives.
These were among the conclusions of a recent CIO.com virtual roundtable -- co-hosted by executives from IBM and AWS -- that explored emerging imperatives in optimizing hybrid-cloud resources. The event featured executive participation from over a dozen companies representing a broad range of industries, including financial services, healthcare, hospitality, logistics, manufacturing and more.
Listen to the executive interview with IBM’s Kara Todd, AWS’ Madhavi (Maddy) Reddy and IBM’s Aparna Sharma by CLICKING HERE.
In the wake of this Chatham House Rule executive event, we caught up with Kara Todd, Vice President of IBM's Z Application Platform, Madhavi (Maddy) Reddy, General Manager of Mainframe Modernization with AWS, and Aparna Sharma, General Manager, Managing Partner of Hybrid Cloud Services with IBM Consulting, to discuss the key points made over the course of the conversation.
Leveraging the Best of Both Worlds
The consensus around effective management of cloud and on-prem reflects evidence captured by the research community with a recent Statista survey noting how mainframe platforms are re-emerging as essential elements of today's hybrid IT infrastructures. Almost two-thirds (71 percent) of Fortune 500 respondents report ongoing – and even rising – investments in mainframe, demonstrating its continuing role in large enterprises.
"Mainframes have been core to many large enterprises and industries for so long. It is difficult to overestimate their importance in delivering high performance to current state environments. Mainframes will continue contributing important capacity and capabilities to the target operating models of the future," says Sharma of IBM Consulting.
The challenge for some leaders, however, is that the organizational structures of many enterprises have contributed to stovepiped thinking, with mainframe application modernization initiatives occurring outside of the context of cloud adoption. Often, this results from outdated perceptions of mainframes as monolithic resources that are incompatible with the agile nature of cloud computing.
That said, it is a perspective that is beginning to change, according to AWS' Reddy.
"More thought is being put into better understanding the relative strengths of mainframe and cloud resources as organizations undertake comprehensive efforts to understand how best to achieve cost savings, business agility and innovation," she says.
"It starts with a careful analysis of what organizations currently have in place with their mainframe estates and developing integrated plans for leveraging the cloud capabilities," adds Reddy.
This line of thinking has contributed to a robust "fit for purpose" conversation about technological investments based on the operational capabilities of specific infrastructure categories and the business outcomes that leaders need to achieve.
"We are consequently seeing a more nuanced discussion about what workloads should move to which platforms to advance mission-critical objectives best," she explains.
Such an analysis may reveal that customer engagement or experience optimization applications -- leveraging technologies like the Internet of Things (IoT), artificial intelligence (AI), or machine learning (ML) -- often find their most effective home in the cloud offerings from hyperscalers like AWS.
"On the other hand, high-throughput and transaction-intensive processing applications may find their best fit on mainframe platforms. The trick is to make the two environments operate together," says Reddy
Not Your Grandparent’s Mainframe
The virtual roundtable revealed a spectrum of understanding about the current state of mainframe capabilities. While mainframes have supported mission-critical processes for years, many clients are investing in modernizing applications to keep pace with digital transformation.
Because of this, investments in mainframe hardware and software modernization have largely kept pace with cloud migration, with analyst firm Allied Market Research projecting the global mainframe market to reach $2.90 billion in annual sales by 2025.
"In the process, a growing number of enterprises are introducing DevOps, application programming interfaces (APIs) and microservices to improve agility and better integrate mainframes with private and public cloud resources," says IBM's Todd.
Far from being a legacy platform that can only be supported by a generation of talent already retired, modern mainframe applications – especially on the IBM Z platform – can deliver modern development environments that today's developers will find familiar.
"With IBM Z, mainframe and cloud development teams can operate in the same manner. They can do their development in AWS and then deploy production-ready applications on IBM Z because it supports languages and tools like Jenkins, GitLab, Docker or Java and more," she concludes.
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EDITORIAL NOTE: To learn more, listen to the executive interview with IBM’s Kara Todd, AWS’ Madhavi (Maddy) Reddy and IBM’s Aparna Sharma by CLICKING HERE.