Overview

Organizations are constantly striving to gain business agility that requires the ability of cloud-native application architecture and an underlying IT infrastructure to react quickly to changing business environments. Many applications use mainframes that ruled IT delivery over the last 50+ years. Recent announcements and events highlight the need to modernize applications. This blog post will help enterprises consider the challenges and opportunities while embarking on a modernization journey.

Background

On November 30th, 2021, during the annual re: Invent conference, Amazon Web Services (AWS) announced the preview of the AWS Mainframe Modernization offering to migrate, modernize, operate, and run mainframe workloads. On December 7th, 2021, AWS had a significant outage in the East Region that brought down tens of thousands of customer applications that included the disruption of Amazon’s eCommerce package delivery operations. On December 8th, 2021, IBM announced a new IBM Z and Cloud Modernization Center to accelerate hybrid cloud, giving customers an option to innovate while keeping existing investments in mainframes. Enterprises should look at these announcements and events together when embarking on an application modernization journey.

Observations

The high availability requirements for mission-critical application workloads are essential when making application migration decisions considering the occasional but disruptive public cloud outages. Enterprises should compare the cost of downtime with lower costs of infrastructure. After migration, the London Stock Exchange suffered an 8-hour interruption in 2008, resulting in lost revenue and reputation. Further evaluation of the new technology platform eventually led to a second migration effort that depicts the results of a path taken without in-depth research into the platform chosen the first time.

Working for a technology service provider earlier in my career motivated the sales team to sell more services to customers to increase revenue. At that time, migration from a mainframe to client-server technology was a good revenue source for systems integrators. Several clients with experience in client-server technologies understood the additional effort in maintaining the new platforms. For example, periodic reboot to clear memory and frequent patching for security fixes took a lot of effort. Several clients declined the opportunity to save licensing costs that, in their opinion, added human effort and support headaches into the equation for managing the IT department. Although cloud service providers handle most backend services, users should be aware of unexpected patching responsibilities, the most recent being the vulnerabilities in Log4j.

One aspect of legacy systems like mainframes that have changed over the years is the ability to run cloud-native applications delivering the benefits of DevOps and agility to customers without a significant rewrite of code. Enterprises can reduce modernization costs by redirecting IT spending towards efforts that gain the most bang for the buck with reduced risk.

Customers need to take several factors into account when deciding to move applications off the mainframe:

1.    IT Spend Allocation: As enterprises aim for business agility, allocate efforts needed to current infrastructure and applications balanced with new initiatives. Spending a high percentage of effort and budget on migration may allow competitors to overtake an enterprise by building competitive solutions. For example, a competitor that leverages existing infrastructure and focuses on innovative solutions to offer pay-by-the-mile premiums for auto insurance customers will be more attractive to many drivers.

2.    Cost: Enterprises need to consider the effort required for application migrations as well as the monetary value of potential downtime described as follows:

·       Migration costs: While DXC Technology, Cap Gemini, Deloitte, and Accenture appear in the IBM and AWS press releases showing that systems integrators are primarily motivated to sell migration services regardless of the outcome. Investment in migration services may result in short-term deployment success and cost reduction but miss the long-term risks to an enterprise incurred by adopting a new platform.

·       Downtime costs: Revenue losses from a single outage may be much higher than multi-year savings in fees from a new platform. Failure in customer confidence may result in the loss of many customers leading to a long-term effect on revenue. As experienced in multiple outages of public cloud providers, a small human error can multiply into downtime for a considerable number of subscribers.

3.    Prioritizing applications: Dynamic business requires an application architecture and supporting infrastructure with the ability to be quickly recalibrated to serve changing user requirements. Modifying and testing brittle applications do not help business agility and require modernization. However, not all enterprise applications require the scalability of public cloud solutions and can use existing infrastructure.
Map service level objectives to business KPI’s since applications vary in high availability requirements. For example, an internally facing inventory application will be OK with three nines (or less), while an automotive assembly line needs five nines for availability. Most applications may be OK with agility provided by modernizing without incurring the additional risk and cost of migration staying on the mainframe infrastructure.

Summary

Several organizations migrate applications primarily to cut costs miss the more significant opportunity of modernization at reduced risk. Modernizing applications that include migration and adoption of new infrastructure needs evaluation of opportunities and challenges and the dangers it brings about. Complete a detailed analysis of the return-on-investment to look at the outcome from a macro business perspective. While systems integrators bring experience, evaluate the long-term benefits with organizational strategy and goals in mind. Public cloud providers provide an excellent platform for start-ups and enterprises building new applications. Multi-cloud (also known as hybrid) implementations are a possible solution but often can be more expensive than modernizing in-place. Before being deployed, applications on the modernization list need detailed analysis and testing to ensure you select the best-fit approach and infrastructure.