Summary
Modern day cloud computing offers numerous advantages in terms of compelling economics, support for new age technologies and platforms as well as the much needed agility to adapt information systems quickly and efficiently. This is the major reason for businesses in the world across all market segments to focus on adoption of cloud computing in every sphere of IT.
For several Fortune 100 and 500 customers across various domains such as banking, finance, insurance, retail, manufacturing etc., mainframe systems, which have existed for well over five decades, continue to be the backbone of several mission-critical applications. Due to numerous challenges associated with the mainframe platform, customers are looking to migrate more of their workloads to cloud.
The purpose of this whitepaper is to present Mindtree’s approach towards helping its customers in migrating their mainframe workloads to cloud and recommend the preferred option among all cloud service providers. This would include our proprietary assessment framework, technology mapping and reference architecture, part of the legacy modernization roadmap and strategy.
Mainframe Migration to Cloud-Challenges and Benefits
Legacy applications, written decades ago, continue to be the backbone of several mission-critical business applications. Over the course of time,they have become unwieldly to maintain and hence, present numerous bottlenecks in terms of lack of agility, huge incremental maintenance costs,unacceptable time to market, shrinking skillset etc.,and hence the need of legacy transformation.Modernization of these systems, which are mission-critical for businesses like banking,insurance, retail, manufacturing etc., will help deliver a unique competitive advantage.
Challenges
The following are the major challenges associated with the migration of mainframe applications to cloud. Mindtree has proven solutions as well as partner products, which adequately address each of these challenges in order to ensure a seamless and smooth migration experience for customers.
- Inadequate planning related to time, effort and cost to migrate to cloud
- Incomplete coverage of migration scope
- Inadequate handling of critical interfaces
- Poor assessment of risk due to performance impact
- Lack of proper documentation with knowledge in silos
