This post has been republished via RSS; it originally appeared at: New blog articles in Microsoft Tech Community.
Introduction
Mainframes are still in wide use today for business-critical applications in many industries. According to a 2021 survey by IBM, 71 percent of executives say mainframe-based applications are central to their business strategies. The applications most identified as running on mainframes were financial-management systems (93 percent), customer-transaction systems of record (73 percent), human resources (HR) systems (62 percent), and supply-chain-management systems of record (58 percent).1
“Today, 45 of the top 50 banks, 4 of the top 5 airlines, 7 of the top 10 global retailers, and 67 of the Fortune 100 companies leverage the mainframe as their core platform.”
— IBM1
While mainframes have been entrenched for decades, the last few years have seen tremendous growth in the newer model of cloud computing, including hybrid clouds and multiclouds. In one survey, 89 percent of global cloud decision makers said their organizations had multicloud strategies. In another survey, more than three quarters of IT professionals indicated that their organizations had deployed at least one application using a hybrid-cloud delivery model, and nearly half (46 percent) said that they had deployed multiple applications that way. Clearly the trend in modernizing data centers is toward creating private clouds and integrating with public clouds.
But what about mainframe modernization and the cloud? Can mainframe applications feasibly be migrated to the cloud? Are there opportunities to modernize mainframe workloads to take advantage of capabilities such as rapid code release and fast access to data that are hallmarks of cloud computing? What kind of effort would such modernization and cloud migration entail, and what might be the return on investment? Is such an effort as difficult and risky as it is sometimes perceived, or do the maturity and best practices of the cloud ecosystem address those perceived risks?
These are the kinds of questions that led Prowess to evaluate the options and resources available for mainframe-dependent companies to adopt alternative solutions. In this paper, we consider the case of Microsoft® Azure® as a potential destination for data and workloads currently on mainframes, and we also consider the ways in which the risks of such a migration might be mitigated.
Motivations to Modernize
The widespread migration to the cloud in recent years has been propelled largely by the promise of cost savings. But the migration has not always been well planned and well managed, with goals that are clearly defined up front. Surveys report that cloud spending is often wasted, and that cloud projects tend to run over budget. But that’s not because cloud projects are inherently wasteful; it’s because poor planning is common. Overall, the move to the cloud has more often than not resulted in cost savings. Accenture’s global survey of 4,000 global business and IT leaders found that nearly 65 percent of respondents saw 10 percent cost savings, on average, when moving to the cloud.
But companies chasing cost savings alone can miss out on the larger picture and find themselves at a competitive disadvantage to those who see the cloud as an opportunity to reinvent their businesses’ operating models. The cost savings are real, but the greater opportunity in modernization is as a launchpad for innovation and business-process improvement. Nowhere is this more the case than for mainframes, where the cost savings can be higher and modernization goes beyond an opportunity—failure to modernize can actually present a risk to the success of the business.
On one hand, the costs of operating on mainframes are notoriously high, not just for expensive hardware and complex software licensing agreements, but for real estate, power, and the costs of the specialized skills required to maintain such legacy systems. Therefore, the opportunity for potential cost savings from migrating workloads to the cloud can be correspondingly high.
On the other hand, the risk inherent in failing to modernize mainframe workloads is substantial. The business landscape is littered with companies that failed to modernize and create new business models, and that did not survive. But even short of a total collapse, failure to modernize can risk the success of a company’s individual line-of-business (LOB) units and can harm top-line revenue.
Businesses can benefit from modernizing or migrating their mainframe workloads to take advantage of cloud capabilities. Agile development and continuous-delivery processes can lead to greater flexibility and responsiveness and reduced development cycles. The ability to burst and scale on demand to virtually unlimited infrastructure resources can mean an end to the over-provisioning that typically occurs with mainframes because of imprecise capacity planning. Data that’s currently trapped in silos or even locked away on tape in vaults can become readily available for analysis, insights, and monetization through innovative new business opportunities.
Sources of Resistance and Misunderstanding
Given the strong case for change, what stops companies from moving forward with mainframe modernization and migration to the cloud? In short: inertia and fear.
Inertia is not uncommon in IT organizations that manage infrastructure. There is a natural tendency to stick with what works and keep doing things the way they have been done. But inertia in the mainframe world is extraordinarily strong, and it’s no wonder. Mainframes, the first business computers, have been around for seven decades. More to the point, a significant cohort of IT professionals have built their careers around mainframes for decades, and they are approaching retirement age—which is not a demographic keen to plunge into a major initiative to unseat the mainframe from its position of dominance.
This inertia goes hand in hand with a certain amount of fear of change. Some of this fear is specific, such as fear of reducing the security posture of the mainframe. But much of the fear is a more generalized dread that change cannot be successful. Tales of companies that tried and failed to escape from mainframe dependency cast a long shadow. These past failures can create a fear of even trying. But it’s important to understand a couple of important things about these past failures that loom so large as a myth of impossibility. First, many of these stories originate from a time when cloud technologies were much less mature and didn’t offer the performance and resiliency of today’s cloud.
Second, a big reason for past failures was that companies went about the project of migration from mainframes in the wrong way. These migrations were often conceived as one big all-or-nothing move that required rewriting everything at once. That’s not the way it’s done anymore. The next section describes some of the many options now available for migration strategies, which can be phased and gradual or even hybrid—not abandoning mainframes and decades of investment entirely, but identifying those workloads that make the most sense to move to the cloud and to modernize. Core business logic can be taken intact to the cloud, and modernization can be prioritized to deliver the greatest return on investment (ROI) for the LOBs.
Finally, the old stories of failure that induce so much fear are just that: old stories. The last few years have produced new stories of success, where companies supported by a robust new infrastructure of partners and technologies have found their paths to the cloud, along with the cost savings and business agility they were looking for. A few of these stories are presented in the Customer Success Stories section of this paper.
Understanding the Microsoft Azure Options
One thing that became clear as we investigated mainframe migration to Azure is that Microsoft dedicates significant resources to helping customers who want to move in this direction. Microsoft has an extended team of more than one hundred people from across the Azure organization, including business strategy and engineering teams who are part of the Microsoft mainframe-transformation initiative, dedicated to helping you on your journey. These trusted advisors have been driving mainframe migrations since 2008, and they have assisted in more than 1,000 migrations. They have developed a mature ecosystem of technology and services partners, including Intel®-based instances and Intel expertise in optimizing for mainframe workloads, with solutions for the most challenging migration scenarios.