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Investing, Innovating, and Integrating the Mainframe: A Strategy for Success

April Hickel
BMC

Consumers are using more digital products every day, and in doing so, they have come to expect easy-to-use, always-available, bug-free digital experiences. As such, development teams are under pressure more than ever before to innovate at a rapid pace and produce high-quality services and applications. In our current environment, the mainframe cannot be a department of "no," or a department of "slow." Instead, organizations must evolve their processes, tools, and culture to respond quickly to market demands and new business needs if they are to be successful.

Key to this move toward faster, more responsive, and higher-quality development is the adoption of a "shift-left" attitude towards testing. Organizations can't afford to develop software, pass it along to operations for testing, and wait for bug reports to be able to resolve issues. By shifting testing closer to development and making it part of their automated continuous integration/continuous delivery (CI/CD) pipeline, they can rapidly test new code, and ultimately drive more agile release cycles with better overall quality.

The results of the 2021 BMC Mainframe Survey highlight the consistent positive growth outlook as seen in recent years, with 92 percent of respondents viewing the mainframe as a platform for long-term growth and new workloads, and 86 percent of extra-large shops expecting MIPS (millions of instructions per second) to grow in the coming year. This is not surprising, considering the disruptive nature of the modern digital economy.

Furthermore, the results of the survey show mainframe Champions — organizations that are increasing their mainframe investment or expect MIPS to grow — have incorporated the mainframe into their enterprise agile development and DevOps initiatives. In doing so, they have improved the stability of their IT infrastructure, the quality of their applications, and the efficiency of their development processes.

Mainframe Security Remains Critical for Enterprises

As organizations look to develop new services and open the mainframe to more, the security of the platform is of utmost concern. For the second consecutive year, according to our survey, security was cited as the top priority for respondents at 61%, with mainframe Champions focusing on proactive security, real-time visibility, and integration of the mainframe with enterprise security information event management (SIEM).

While the mainframe is inherently securable, last year's rapid shift to remote work only further proved that the traditional network perimeter is dead, and a proactive approach is essential to ensure mainframe protection. Based on our survey, 86% of respondents conducted an internal security audit in the last two years that revealed an unaddressed vulnerability. Furthermore, the most common vulnerability findings were related to the operating system (41%) and configuration (40%).

Champions are recognizing that with the breakdown of the enterprise perimeter, audits are no longer enough to guarantee protection from threats. The mainframe must also be proactively secured, with real-time visibility and SIEM integration to enable fast detection and response by security operations center (SOC) teams. This is also critical for the evolution to an autonomous digital enterprise (ADE). To continuously protect against vulnerabilities, malicious actions, and data theft businesses should consider:

■ Having the ability to halt suspicious and known malicious actions before systems are compromised. This can be accomplished through automated protection, detection, and response.

■ Ensuring real-time visibility for security responders and operations teams so that they can rapidly close the window of opportunity for attackers. This could be the difference between a secure platform and harmful attack.

■ Collecting actionable intelligence for incident response. To do this, it is important for data to be correlated across multiple systems and translated into common security terms for clarity and context.

Innovating to Meet Rising Digital Demands

Enterprises are moving quickly to keep pace with the rising demand for new applications and services and deliver a transcendent customer experience, which is a key tenet of the ADE, to both their employees and customers. According to our survey, champions update their mainframe applications more frequently — and want to further accelerate delivery. They've made Agile/DevOps a staple of development across the enterprise, including in mainframe-only environments, and it's paying off with rapid return on investment (ROI).

Champions are realizing the broad benefits that come from DevOps, which include:

■ Improving IT infrastructure stability and the quality of deployed applications.

■ Automating manual tasks to reduce errors and free development staff to work on high-value initiatives.

■ Leveraging modern development tools to attract new talent to create new innovations on the platform.

Overall, the results of the survey show that the platform will be an integral part of organizations' workload infrastructure for decades to come. In a year defined by sharp increases in digital activities from remote working to online banking, commerce, and entertainment, businesses counted on their mainframe to handle new levels of unpredictability. As enterprise evolution continues, the mainframe will help organizations evolve to ADEs, where competitive differentiation is enabled by agility, customer centricity, and actionable insights.

April Hickel is VP, Intelligent Z Optimization and Transformation, at BMC

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Investing, Innovating, and Integrating the Mainframe: A Strategy for Success

April Hickel
BMC

Consumers are using more digital products every day, and in doing so, they have come to expect easy-to-use, always-available, bug-free digital experiences. As such, development teams are under pressure more than ever before to innovate at a rapid pace and produce high-quality services and applications. In our current environment, the mainframe cannot be a department of "no," or a department of "slow." Instead, organizations must evolve their processes, tools, and culture to respond quickly to market demands and new business needs if they are to be successful.

Key to this move toward faster, more responsive, and higher-quality development is the adoption of a "shift-left" attitude towards testing. Organizations can't afford to develop software, pass it along to operations for testing, and wait for bug reports to be able to resolve issues. By shifting testing closer to development and making it part of their automated continuous integration/continuous delivery (CI/CD) pipeline, they can rapidly test new code, and ultimately drive more agile release cycles with better overall quality.

The results of the 2021 BMC Mainframe Survey highlight the consistent positive growth outlook as seen in recent years, with 92 percent of respondents viewing the mainframe as a platform for long-term growth and new workloads, and 86 percent of extra-large shops expecting MIPS (millions of instructions per second) to grow in the coming year. This is not surprising, considering the disruptive nature of the modern digital economy.

Furthermore, the results of the survey show mainframe Champions — organizations that are increasing their mainframe investment or expect MIPS to grow — have incorporated the mainframe into their enterprise agile development and DevOps initiatives. In doing so, they have improved the stability of their IT infrastructure, the quality of their applications, and the efficiency of their development processes.

Mainframe Security Remains Critical for Enterprises

As organizations look to develop new services and open the mainframe to more, the security of the platform is of utmost concern. For the second consecutive year, according to our survey, security was cited as the top priority for respondents at 61%, with mainframe Champions focusing on proactive security, real-time visibility, and integration of the mainframe with enterprise security information event management (SIEM).

While the mainframe is inherently securable, last year's rapid shift to remote work only further proved that the traditional network perimeter is dead, and a proactive approach is essential to ensure mainframe protection. Based on our survey, 86% of respondents conducted an internal security audit in the last two years that revealed an unaddressed vulnerability. Furthermore, the most common vulnerability findings were related to the operating system (41%) and configuration (40%).

Champions are recognizing that with the breakdown of the enterprise perimeter, audits are no longer enough to guarantee protection from threats. The mainframe must also be proactively secured, with real-time visibility and SIEM integration to enable fast detection and response by security operations center (SOC) teams. This is also critical for the evolution to an autonomous digital enterprise (ADE). To continuously protect against vulnerabilities, malicious actions, and data theft businesses should consider:

■ Having the ability to halt suspicious and known malicious actions before systems are compromised. This can be accomplished through automated protection, detection, and response.

■ Ensuring real-time visibility for security responders and operations teams so that they can rapidly close the window of opportunity for attackers. This could be the difference between a secure platform and harmful attack.

■ Collecting actionable intelligence for incident response. To do this, it is important for data to be correlated across multiple systems and translated into common security terms for clarity and context.

Innovating to Meet Rising Digital Demands

Enterprises are moving quickly to keep pace with the rising demand for new applications and services and deliver a transcendent customer experience, which is a key tenet of the ADE, to both their employees and customers. According to our survey, champions update their mainframe applications more frequently — and want to further accelerate delivery. They've made Agile/DevOps a staple of development across the enterprise, including in mainframe-only environments, and it's paying off with rapid return on investment (ROI).

Champions are realizing the broad benefits that come from DevOps, which include:

■ Improving IT infrastructure stability and the quality of deployed applications.

■ Automating manual tasks to reduce errors and free development staff to work on high-value initiatives.

■ Leveraging modern development tools to attract new talent to create new innovations on the platform.

Overall, the results of the survey show that the platform will be an integral part of organizations' workload infrastructure for decades to come. In a year defined by sharp increases in digital activities from remote working to online banking, commerce, and entertainment, businesses counted on their mainframe to handle new levels of unpredictability. As enterprise evolution continues, the mainframe will help organizations evolve to ADEs, where competitive differentiation is enabled by agility, customer centricity, and actionable insights.

April Hickel is VP, Intelligent Z Optimization and Transformation, at BMC

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OpenTelemetry (OTel) arrived with a grand promise: a unified, vendor-neutral standard for observability data (traces, metrics, logs) that would free engineers from vendor lock-in and provide deeper insights into complex systems ... No powerful technology comes without its challenges, and OpenTelemetry is no exception. The engineers we spoke with were frank about the friction points they've encountered ...

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The power of Kubernetes lies in its ability to orchestrate containerized applications with unparalleled efficiency. Yet, this power comes at a cost: the dynamic, distributed, and ephemeral nature of its architecture creates a monitoring challenge akin to tracking a constantly shifting, interconnected network of fleeting entities ... Due to the dynamic and complex nature of Kubernetes, monitoring poses a substantial challenge for DevOps and platform engineers. Here are the primary obstacles ...

The perception of IT has undergone a remarkable transformation in recent years. What was once viewed primarily as a cost center has transformed into a pivotal force driving business innovation and market leadership ... As someone who has witnessed and helped drive this evolution, it's become clear to me that the most successful organizations share a common thread: they've mastered the art of leveraging IT advancements to achieve measurable business outcomes ...

More than half (51%) of companies are already leveraging AI agents, according to the PagerDuty Agentic AI Survey. Agentic AI adoption is poised to accelerate faster than generative AI (GenAI) while reshaping automation and decision-making across industries ...

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Real privacy protection thanks to technology and processes is often portrayed as too hard and too costly to implement. So the most common strategy is to do as little as possible just to conform to formal requirements of current and incoming regulations. This is a missed opportunity ...

The expanding use of AI is driving enterprise interest in data operations (DataOps) to orchestrate data integration and processing and improve data quality and validity, according to a new report from Information Services Group (ISG) ...