The Legacy Shift: How to Accelerate Business Value with Mainframe Modernization

Global enterprises use mainframes to run mission-critical applications, especially core workloads and huge data processing tasks. Analysts reveal that up to 70% of Fortune 500 companies use mainframes, including 44 of 50 top banks and top 10 global insurers. These enterprises are now transitioning from mainframes to next-generation technologies for unlocking business value.

Digitalization has brought about optimization in business processes. Large batch workloads are now replaced with increased real-time processing and enhanced workflows resulting in a significant decrease in end-to-end turnaround time. In addition, intense competition demands that enterprises undertake advanced analytics and distill business insights from customer data. For instance, retailers now leverage data analytics to accurately predict purchase trends and replenish goods in their stores. 

The mainframe modernization imperative

Today, enterprises need to transcend legacy systems to operate as digital-first and cloud-first businesses. They are realigning their business models to remain relevant, increase their digital footprint, optimize costs, become more responsive and future-proof. Enterprises are also exploring solutions beyond mainframes due to a paucity of skills and escalating infrastructure costs. A Gartner survey reveals that CIOs want to modernize legacy IT systems, with primary drivers being increased operational efficiency (31%), innovation support (25%), improved customer and / or partners service (24%), and support for digital transformation (23%). 

Cloud computing underpins the mainframe modernization roadmap for enterprises to realize accelerated outcomes:

1. Enhanced agility, resulting in improved time to market for products and features 
2. Unlocked data trapped in mainframes for deep analytical capabilities
3. Real-time streaming of data for digital channels
4. Elasticity to handle peaks and troughs in demand without sacrificing performance and availability
5. Reduced infrastructure costs

The AWS advantage

Amazon Web Services (AWS) is a global cloud service provider offering a broad spectrum of services. In 2021, AWS was the market leader with 56% of the cloud market. It has a suite of solutions and services to address mainframe modernization needs, underpinned by high availability, automatic scaling, and robust security. AWS Mainframe Modernization (preview) is a unique platform that allows you to migrate your on-premises mainframe workloads to a managed runtime environment on AWS. Mainframe Modernization enables two popular migration patterns: replatforming and automated refactoring.

AWS also offers a wide variety of storage services, allowing convenient storage and access to all data types, including archived data on mainframe tapes. Serverless data pipelines provide the elasticity required to manage new or growing data feeds. 

A range of AWS application hosting options, including virtual machines, containers, platform-as-a-service (PaaS), and serverless models, ensure a custom-fit solution for every application need. Batch jobs can be run in a serverless manner to optimize resource usage. Mainframe emulators such as Micro Focus Enterprise Server for “lift and shift” and auto-code converters are provided as PaaS through the AWS Marketplace, as these success stories testify:

• A US luxury department store migrated to AWS for a 25% improvement in completion of batches, as well as US$20 million savings over five years. 
• A US asset management company transformed its core record-keeping platform on mainframes and reshaped the corporate retirement plan experience for sponsors and participants by migrating to AWS. 

Modernization to address shifts

The dynamics of mainframe modernization are unique to business requirements of enterprises. Broadly, the themes or patterns include: 

• Mainframe virtualization (lift and shift, or rehost): A preferred solution for small to medium-sized workloads (<2000 MIPS), accelerating reduction of over 50% in the total cost of ownership in less than three years. 
• Domain-led transformation (rewrite), re-imagining and rationalizing business processes: A popular choice to build applications using microservices-based architecture. 
• Auto-code conversion and technology migration (deploy now, refactor later): A new trend for immediate reduction in operational costs.
• Externalizing APIs, data, and configurable business rules: An option exercised by enterprises that operate mainframes to empower business analysts and reduce IT changes.

Introducing Infosys Modernization Suite

Infosys Modernization Suite, part of Infosys Cobalt, supports a range of mainframe modernization themes, including mainframe virtualization, domain-led transformation, and technology migrations. It automates more than 90% of analysis, which is the foundation of migrations. The suite offers business insights on code and non-code artifacts (e.g., cyclomatic complexity and scheduler dependencies). A case in point: a US retailer undertook a large-scale assessment of its core workloads of 10K+ MIPS in six weeks. It accelerated mainframe virtualization (rehost) by making the applications compatible for a mainframe-like runtime environment on the cloud. 

In database and data migration, Infosys Modernization Suite supports analysis, the definition of the data model; data migration, audit trail, and data reconciliation. It also accelerates analysis and migration of non-RDBMS data files, such as generation data groups (GDGs) and indexed VSAM files to a host of AWS storage services such as Amazon Relational Database Service (RDS) and Amazon S3. Even for enterprises undertaking a data migration without a large-scale transformation, it helps business value realization in terms of infrastructure cost savings, and unlocks data residing in mainframes for advanced analytics. For example, a global energy client reduced batch processing time by 60% by migrating tapes and data to PostgreSQL, while also retiring technical debt from hardware.

Mainframe data, which can include hundreds of terabyte data of historical business transactions for thousands of users, is instrumental for business analytics and forecasting. Therefore, customers use big data analytics to unleash mainframe data’s business value, and they use AWS services such as Amazon Redshift, Amazon Athena, Amazon Quicksight and Redshift Spectrum for faster analytics and to semi-structured and unstructured data with the flexibility to grow and scale as they go. Infosys Modernization Suite provides the plaform for enterprises to build a data lake on AWS to grow seamlessly.

Today, migrating legacy systems to the cloud has become a business imperative. Enterprises are no longer asking: “Why should we drop our mainframe systems?” Instead, they are asking: “How  should we do it?” A seamless AWS mainframe modernization journey supported by the automated approach of Infosys Modernization Suite helps enterprises navigate from technology laggards to technology leaders. 

Contact us. We work with customers to discover, evaluate, and integrate software, services, and processes that help reimagine the enterprise value chain in the cloud and deliver fast time to value.

About the Authors

Dr. Sameer Goel, Practice Head, Mainframe Modernization – Modernization Practice, Infosys

Jignesh Desai is the AWS WW Migration Solutions Archictect for Infosys