Investing, Innovating, and Integrating the Mainframe: A Strategy for Success
November 17, 2021

April Hickel
BMC

Share this

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
Share this

The Latest

March 18, 2024

Gartner has highlighted the top trends that will impact technology providers in 2024: Generative AI (GenAI) is dominating the technical and product agenda of nearly every tech provider ...

March 15, 2024

In MEAN TIME TO INSIGHT Episode 4 - Part 1, Shamus McGillicuddy, VP of Research, Network Infrastructure and Operations, at Enterprise Management Associates (EMA) discusses artificial intelligence and network management ...

March 14, 2024

The integration and maintenance of AI-enabled Software as a Service (SaaS) applications have emerged as pivotal points in enterprise AI implementation strategies, offering both significant challenges and promising benefits. Despite the enthusiasm surrounding AI's potential impact, the reality of its implementation presents hurdles. Currently, over 90% of enterprises are grappling with limitations in integrating AI into their tech stack ...

March 13, 2024

In the intricate landscape of IT infrastructure, one critical component often relegated to the back burner is Active Directory (AD) forest recovery — an oversight with costly consequences ...

March 12, 2024

eBPF is a technology that allows users to run custom programs inside the Linux kernel, which changes the behavior of the kernel and makes execution up to 10x faster(link is external) and more efficient for key parts of what makes our computing lives work. That includes observability, networking and security ...

March 11, 2024

Data mesh, an increasingly important decentralized approach to data architecture and organizational design, focuses on treating data as a product, emphasizing domain-oriented data ownership, self-service tools and federated governance. The 2024 State of the Data Lakehouse report from Dremio presents evidence of the growing adoption of data mesh architectures in enterprises ... The report highlights that the drive towards data mesh is increasingly becoming a business strategy to enhance agility and speed in problem-solving and innovation ...

March 07, 2024
In this digital era, consumers prefer a seamless user experience, and here, the significance of performance testing cannot be overstated. Application performance testing is essential in ensuring that your software products, websites, or other related systems operate seamlessly under varying conditions. However, the cost of poor performance extends beyond technical glitches and slow load times; it can directly affect customer satisfaction and brand reputation. Understand the tangible and intangible consequences of poor application performance and how it can affect your business ...
March 06, 2024

Too much traffic can crash a website ... That stampede of traffic is even more horrifying when it's part of a malicious denial of service attack ... These attacks are becoming more common, more sophisticated and increasingly tied to ransomware-style demands. So it's no wonder that the threat of DDoS remains one of the many things that keep IT and marketing leaders up at night ...

March 05, 2024

Today, applications serve as the backbone of businesses, and therefore, ensuring optimal performance has never been more critical. This is where application performance monitoring (APM) emerges as an indispensable tool, empowering organizations to safeguard their applications proactively, match user expectations, and drive growth. But APM is not without its challenges. Choosing to implement APM is a path that's not easily realized, even if it offers great benefits. This blog deals with the potential hurdles that may manifest when you actualize your APM strategy in your IT application environment ...

March 04, 2024

This year's Super Bowl drew in viewership of nearly 124 million viewers and made history as the most-watched live broadcast event since the 1969 moon landing. To support this spike in viewership, streaming companies like YouTube TV, Hulu and Paramount+ began preparing their IT infrastructure months in advance to ensure an exceptional viewer experience without outages or major interruptions. New Relic conducted a survey to understand the importance of a seamless viewing experience and the impact of outages during major streaming events such as the Super Bowl ...