The power of a mainframe modernization and cloud migration strategy

Why modernization? Why now?

Mainframe systems have been the technology backbone for most large organizations for more than 50 years, offering reliability and critical processing power. However, shifts in markets, technology, and talent are compelling organizations to modernize their mainframe application architectures. Consumer demands for real-time transactions, personalization, and Internet of Things require access to technologies like artificial intelligence (AI) and cloud computing—which mainframe applications often can’t support.

Yet, modernization efforts can present significant challenges with complexity, fear of disruption, budget constraints, and talent shortages. Overcoming these challenges requires a holistic strategy and implementation plan, prioritizing key needs and leveraging automation. Effective stakeholder engagement and clear communication are also crucial to success—as is choosing the right modernization approach to align with business goals.

The payoff is worth the effort, though. Companies that modernize can reduce costs, improve security, boost performance, and increase agility—thus enhancing their ability to innovate faster and rapidly respond to dynamic markets. The bottom line? Modernization can unlock the enormous potential of your business, but you have to take the leap.
 

A leading US-based global financial institution

The bank faced legacy technology hurdles to drive growth and provide superior experiences to its high-net-worth clients. It was also having difficulty in addressing talent risk and institutional knowledge. To overcome these challenges, the bank needed to drastically modernize its technology, including maintaining and moving off the mainframe, which would afford significant autonomy, innovation (FinOps, GenAI, etc.), speed to market, and enablement of its strategic priorities.

To assess potential modernization benefits, the bank performed a detailed analysis of current spend on its mainframe, then benchmarked those costs to potential modernization costs. The analysis showed that a business value-based approach to mainframe modernization could lead to reducing mainframe talent dependency by approximately 75% and decrease time to market by about 40% overall via improved developer productivity with modern engineering practices by 2028.

The state of Utah

The state of Utah undertook a modernization effort to modernize its mainframe-based ORSIS Child Support system, which was deployed on a mainframe platform using COBOL that enabled innovation, scalability, staffing, and other challenges. Rewriting the application would have cost US$200 million, required federal agency certification, and added five to 10 years to the modernization process.

Through automated code conversion, however, the state successfully transferred 2.5 million lines of COBOL, 250 screens, 400 batch jobs, and 2 terabytes of data to the cloud. The cloud migration benefits were clear: The flexibility and scalability provided by the cloud architecture gave the state the ability to process transactions for the thousands of families who depend on child support in Utah.