Business leaders are under increasing pressure to drive digital transformation initiatives, at minimum cost and risk. They want to take advantage of the value of hybrid cloud and improve speed to market for applications that enable innovation. Therefore, they seek to grow key skills, eliminate silos, automate processes and increase agility.
However, as organizations start — or continue — their journey to cloud, they also need to tackle the core business processes or systems of record, with many of those mission-critical applications and data running on mainframe (IBM Z or IBM i) platforms. They are looking for ways to optimize investments across all platforms including the mainframe, while integrating this environment with the cloud and distributed environments. And while they need to transform their applications and environments to deliver business value, many struggle with how to ensure they maintain the right skills within the teams working on the platform.
Kyndryl’s Petra Goude, SVP of Core Enterprise & zCloud, and Harish Grama, SVP of Cloud, talk about how customers can use mainframe transformation and application modernization to better utilize investments in their core enterprise and drive better business outcomes from their IT.
Organizations aiming to transform their mainframe environment as part of their hybrid cloud strategy should take a holistic, workload-by-workload approach. They need to decide if they want to modernize their workloads on the mainframe, integrate them with the public cloud, or move some or all workloads off the platform. With extensive cloud and mainframe modernization skills and expertise, as well as decades of experience serving customers across all industries, Kyndryl can help business and IT leaders define the right platform strategy for their organization.
Here are a few ways that Kyndryl is helping customers with mainframe modernization:
- A financial services institution in Canada is partnering with Kyndryl to modernize workloads on the mainframe as part of its digital transformation. They want to have a modern infrastructure to attract new talent that will support the mainframe, and use DevOps tools to enable more agile application development. Kyndryl is helping the customer with the adoption of new technology and the DevOps transformation to future-proof resources, support employees, and work towards transforming to a cloud consumption-based model.
- US-based Delta Air Lines has shifted to a hybrid cloud architecture, leveraging the agility of the cloud and the dependability of the mainframe. They will continue to rely on its strong mainframe backbone managed and modernized by Kyndryl, while delivering services through high-performing cloud capabilities from AWS. Kyndryl will integrate automation capabilities to enable more agility in moving and managing data across various environments, and re-architect its infrastructure to better harness data for future innovations.
- UK telecommunications provider BT Group is working with Kyndryl on a cutting-edge program to move a number of the Group´s mainframe applications to the cloud. This complex project will see the company´s digital unit move critical legacy applications that cannot be shut down in the short term to the cloud, allowing it to operate this part of its IT infrastructure in a more modern way.
To learn more on mainframe modernization as part of a hybrid cloud journey, see Kyndryl’s paper on the Keys to Mainframe Modernization.
