What Could Your Mainframe Look Like in 10 Years?

With IT advancing at breakneck speed, it's only natural to wonder what might happen to your trusty mainframe as time passes and new technologies arise (AI, anyone?). Yet, while no one can predict the future with any real certainty, we can make educated guesses based on current trends and our team's experience.

One thing is certain: Mainframes are here to stay, at least for the next decade or more.

Despite all the buzz about cloud computing and distributed systems, mainframes are still a key part of IT strategies at many organizations. But don't take it from us. Article after article from the world’s top experts show that organizations rely on their mainframe to get business done.

So, what does that mean for your mainframe over the next 10 years? Here's how it could look if you start planning now.

Your Future Mainframe Could Be More Resilient

Mainframes are built for resilience, but there are steps you can take to make them even more robust and reliable.

As technology evolves and demands grow, enhancing your mainframe's resilience helps you keep operations smooth and downtime to a minimum. Here are some practical strategies to strengthen your mainframe for the future.

Strategies to Boost Your Mainframe Resilience:

1. Implementing High Availability (HA) Solutions: Utilize HA technology to distribute workloads across multiple processing centers, which balances the load and ensures that if one center encounters issues, another site can take over, significantly reducing the risk of downtime.
2. Separating Production and Non-Production Environments: Keep production and non-production environments separate to avoid disruptions from development and testing. This helps maintain a stable and secure production environment.
3. Enhancing Monitoring with Real-Time Dashboards and Automation: Set up real-time monitoring dashboards combined with automation to quickly view mainframe performance and potential issues. These dashboards and automated alerts help you safeguard your environment and detect problems early.
4. Implementing Resilience Features: Despite their importance, some z/OS features that significantly enhance resilience often go underutilized. A few examples to consider are z/OS Health Checker, z/OS Predictive Failure Analysis (PFA), z/OS runtime diagnostics, and z/OS Workload Manager tuning, among others. Additionally, effective patch management and stringent access management for privileged users are crucial for maintaining system integrity and security.
5. Regularly Conducting Disaster Recovery Tests: Evaluate your mainframe's disaster recovery plan often to ensure it is updated and effective. Be sure to include testing backup and restore processes, data replication, and failover mechanisms.

By implementing these strategies and keeping them in check, you can make sure your mainframe works smoothly and reliably over the next decade.

Your Future Mainframe Could Be Cheaper & Lighter

Today’s CIOs are under pressure to cut costs and reduce IT's physical footprint. It's led some businesses to move their mainframe workloads to the cloud – but that's not always the most cost-effective solution. In fact, many organizations have found ways to optimize their existing mainframes and reduce costs without sacrificing performance or switching to a new platform.

How can you further reduce mainframe costs over the next decade? Consider these strategies:

Strategies for Cost Reduction and Lighter Mainframe Footprint:

1.    Optimizing Workloads: Optimize your workloads by identifying tasks that can be offloaded to other platforms, processed more efficiently on the mainframe, or even removed altogether. This reduces unnecessary usage and cuts costs.

2.    Optimizing Data: Remove all unnecessary data to allow the mainframe to run more efficiently. This helps in reducing storage costs and improving performance.

3.    Embracing Virtualization: Take advantage of virtualization technology to consolidate workloads and reduce hardware costs, which also enables better utilization of resources, leading to cost savings.

4.    Considering Alternative Licensing Models: Mainframe licensing can be a significant expense. Consider alternative licensing models like sub-capacity pricing or pay-for-use options that align more closely with your actual usage.

5.    Exploring Hybrid Options: Hybrid solutions combine the scalability and cost-effectiveness of cloud computing with the reliability and security of mainframes. It’s a great way to help you save on hardware costs while still leveraging your mainframe's strengths.

Mainframe costs are one of IT leaders' main concerns – and achieving cost-efficiency is possible with the right strategies in place.

Your Future Mainframe Could Be Easier To Innovate

Innovation is essential for staying competitive, and your mainframe can be a powerful platform for driving new solutions and services. Here's how you can take steps now to enhance your mainframe's flexibility, streamline processes, and make it easier to innovate in the next decade.

Strategies to Drive Constant Innovation on Your Mainframe:

1. Removing Non-Core Languages and Environments: Streamline your mainframe by eliminating outdated or rarely used languages and environments. Reducing your environment’s complexity should free up resources for new, strategic technologies.
2. Adopting Modern Development Tools: Use modern development tools that integrate seamlessly with mainframe environments. Tools like DevOps and continuous integration/continuous delivery (CI/CD) pipelines improve agility and speed up the development process.
3. Streamlining Change Management: Implement effective change management practices to ensure changes are deployed smoothly and efficiently. Automated testing and deployment frameworks can help minimize disruptions and accelerate innovation cycles.
4. Creating a Mainframe Center of Excellence: A mainframe center of excellence (CoE) serves as a knowledge hub for all things mainframe related. A CoE can also provide resources, training, and best practices to empower your teams to solve problems and innovate more effectively.
5. Holding Regular Collaboration Meetings: Plan regular meetings and collaboration sessions to bring mainframe experts, partners, and other IT teams together. Doing so cultivates a culture of innovation and ensures the mainframe is considered in broader IT strategies.

Implementing these strategies not only ensures that your mainframe is a robust, business-ready platform, it also makes it a key player in future innovation and growth.

Your Future Mainframe Could Be More Secure

Mainframes have earned a stellar reputation as secure computing platforms, but increased cyber threats and the expansion of regulatory requirements make things all the more challenging for businesses.

Since enhancing your mainframe security over the next decade is going to be a number one priority for most businesses, here’s how you can keep your mainframe protected against today’s and tomorrow’s threats.

Strategies to Enhance Mainframe Security:

1. Encrypt Critical Data: Focus on encrypting sensitive information both at rest and in transit. Prioritizing critical data helps protect it from unauthorized access while managing costs effectively.
2. Regularly Review Security Configuration: Regularly review and update your RACF, ACF2, or Top Secret configuration to enforce robust access controls and ensure only authorized users can interact with your mainframe resources. Implement Role Based Access Control (RBAC) measures and ensure the ability to log and monitor your privileged users. Consolidating your security suite can also help improve your organization’s protection.
3. Implement Multi-Factor Authentication (MFA): Require multi-factor authentication for high-privilege users to add an extra layer of security. MFA makes it significantly more difficult for malicious actors to gain access using compromised credentials.
4. Review Current Security Monitoring and Alerting: Enhance your security posture by reviewing and upgrading your current monitoring and alerting systems. Implement real-time alerts to quickly detect and respond to security incidents.
5. Reduce Gateways into the Mainframe: Minimize the number of entry points into your mainframe to limit potential vulnerabilities. This includes reviewing and securing APIs, network connections, and other interfaces that provide access to mainframe resources.

Enhancing your mainframe’s security isn’t a one-time exercise but an ongoing commitment. It requires constant monitoring, updates, and continuous progress to stay ahead of evolving threats.

Annual security assessments are a great way for your business to identify vulnerabilities and adapt to new challenges. To keep your business secure over the next decade, it's essential to plan and implement these strategies now.

The Next Decade in Mainframes

As we look ahead to the next 10 years, the idea of mainframes becoming obsolete seems more and more unlikely, especially as these systems and approaches evolve. But the question for businesses is: Are you ready to evolve with them? If you’re not thinking about this now, the next 10 years could be rough.

Futureproofing your mainframe over the next decade will require a holistic and strategic approach that considers not just performance and cost-efficiency, but also innovation and security. That way your mainframe can not only continue to be a more valuable asset for your business, but also a strategic driver of growth and success for years to come. When you’re ready, CPT is here to help.