5 Ways to Ensure Your Business Keeps Pace with the Modern Mainframe

As it enters its sixth decade, the future of the mainframe is still as bright as ever.

IBM’s z16 offers real-time AI inferencing and quantum-safe technologies. Its integrated AI accelerators deliver unmatched speed, scale, and low latency, making it ideal for high-volume workloads and fraud detection. And the z17 promises to bring even more powerful capabilities to the table. Building on the success of the z16, it is expected to feature enhanced AI and machine learning integration, improved security measures, and greater scalability.

These advancements will make it easier for organizations to integrate their mainframes with cloud services and leverage real-time data processing for critical business insights.

The modern mainframe is a powerful platform for business growth. But unlocking its full potential requires the teams managing it to keep pace. Outdated mainframe development processes and siloed teams can often hinder efficiency and agility.

To unlock the true value of the mainframe, organizations should be thinking about integrating mainframe and cloud development teams, and standardizing dev tools and processes.

Here are five strategies to ensure you’re keeping pace

1. Ensure workloads are running in the right place: A good place to start is by conducting an audit of the applications currently running on your mainframe. You might find that several are better suited to the cloud.
   Our guide, Right Workload, Right Place, is designed to help you optimize the placement of workloads within hybrid environments.
2. Modernize the mainframe: Adopting an iterative approach to modernization and aligning initiatives to strategic business goals will make it much easier to prioritize, get buy-in for, and maximize value from modernization projects.
   You can accelerate and derisk your modernization process while upskilling your staff and enabling them to stay focused on their critical day-to-day tasks, by working with an experienced mainframe modernization partner.
3. Build a future-proof talent pool: Recruiting mainframe talent isn’t easy, but if your organization is truly committed to modernizing the mainframe and treating it as a first-class citizen, you’ll find it a lot easier to attract people with the right skills.
   You can also grow your mainframe staff pipeline by thinking outside the box and widening your search parameters to include graduates, career switchers, retired professionals who looking for part-time work. Apprenticeships programs are another great way to build your pipeline. We developed the Ensono Mainframe Academy to do just that.
   Don’t rule out your distributed developers (see the next section for how to enable them to work on mainframe applications).
4. Unify developer teams around standardized codebases, tools, and processes: Modern mainframes support a range of modern programming languages and frameworks, including Python, Java, and JavaScript, as well as frameworks for AI and machine learning.
   Translating COBOL into modern languages is one approach, but even using AI-assistive tooling to make it more accessible would make recruitment easier and help unite mainframe and cloud development teams.
   Several integrated DevOps tools and processes are available to support the integration of mainframe and distributed teams. This leads to enhanced efficiency and agility, accelerated release timelines, and reduced risk, all of which is good for business.
5. Consider moving your mainframe out of your data center and closer to the cloud: Connecting your mainframe to the public cloud is the best way to get the best of both worlds without unacceptable latency and cloud egress costs. It requires moving your mainframe to a data center near your chosen public cloud provider to enable a direct connection. This “cloud-connected” mainframe approach sets you up for accelerated digital transformation by giving you the best of both worlds.

Ready to unlock the full potential of your mainframe?

Find out how Ensono can help you on your modernization journey here: Mainframe Modernization | Ensono.