The mainframe industry is at a pivotal moment in its history – the need for increased compliance requirements, the desire for tighter networks with customers, the growing cloud environment, cost pressures, the need for modern user experience, etc., all contribute to the growing need for mainframe modernization. 

According to a recent report from Forrester, 67% of enterprise infrastructure technology decision-makers say that they use mainframes, over half state that they plan to increase their use of mainframes over the next two years, and another 31% predict that their use will stay the same. With the mainframe here to stay, here are three ways companies can optimize the mainframe for efficient business operations.

Digitally Transforming the Mainframe

Modernization – including automation – is not a “one and done” journey. It’s continuous. According to my company’s recent survey, mainframes remain a core aspect of IT infrastructure, with 80% of IT professionals saying mainframes remain critical to business operations. Emerging technologies hold great promise for digital transformation, but it turns out that most organizations won’t completely abandon their traditional tools to pursue such innovation. However, as with any technology, organizations must prioritize modernization to get the most value from the mainframe.

Modernizing the mainframe enables organizations to overcome hurdles such as the transition to remote work and the need for higher-quality outcomes and for contemporary user experience, to name a few. Efficiency is essential for today’s businesses to remain competitive – that’s why technology should be oriented towards the central goal of helping people become more efficient and productive at work.

Modernizing with the Cloud

While full cloud migration gets a lot of buzz, the mainframe continues to dominate IT infrastructure because of its reliability, availability, serviceability, efficiency, and security – and that doesn’t appear to be changing any time soon.

The cloud offers many benefits to organizations when integrated successfully with mainframe data stores. IT leaders are accustomed to balancing the needs and priorities of executives, end-users across the organization and their own teams, and a hybrid approach solves for these challenges.

As continued digital transformation remains a priority for enterprises to gain a competitive advantage, those that rely on mainframes need a roadmap to bring this critical IT infrastructure into the future. To overcome challenges to mainframe performance, such as increasing workloads and the shift to remote work, cloud migration is a key element of mainframe modernization strategy. 

Businesses need to leverage their years of technology investments and the latest tools available to deliver modern user experiences and improved performance with a unified IT environment. According to the aforementioned survey, 82% of IT professionals are migrating at least some of their workloads and operations from mainframe to cloud. Modernizing in place with a hybrid cloud strategy is the path for enterprises to achieve the best business outcomes into the future. 

While ripping and replacing mainframe infrastructure is not a pragmatic approach for most enterprises, they still need to find ways to integrate each of their tech stacks together to optimize performance. Leveraging the diversity of solutions available from cloud to mainframe and optimizing each stack to work together friction-free creates the most effective, unified environment.

How Modernizing Helps Close the Skills Gap

Companies using mainframes are experiencing a skills gap as new experienced talent remains a sellers’ market. And as new trained hires remain elusive, experienced employees are retiring in droves – taking with them their expertise and years of historical knowledge, presenting additional training challenges for new hires. Combined with the misconception that mainframe technology is outdated, this puts many new hires back developmentally. According to a McKinsey survey of more than 1,500 senior executives globally, some 87% say their companies are not adequately prepared to address this skills gap.

In fact, mainframe workloads are increasing as they facilitate the massive data processing required by industries ranging from finance to health care. With the right messaging and strategy, organizations can bridge the mainframe capability gap to demonstrate the many possibilities available on the mainframe and the mission-critical work that can and must be done to ensure day-to-day operations continue.

Though they may not realize it, people are interacting with solutions that run on mainframes every single day. As mainframe workloads continue to increase and be responsible for the data processing required in industries in the most critical markets, successful organizations are those that invest in the best tools and the best people.