LzLabs announced the results of its latest global survey, conducted by Vanson Bourne, revealing that the desire to migrate, modernise and embrace cloud for critical mainframe applications is rapidly increasing amongst global IT decision makers.
Almost all respondents to the survey think their mainframe applications as important or critical to business operations. At the same time, the overwhelming majority report they would consider migrating their application assets off the platform.
The survey of 650 IT leaders globally has confirmed that the trend of new IT modernisation options being performed off the mainframe is continuing, with organisations seeking to reduce system breaks between applications on legacy platforms and those on open systems and the cloud.
Post-pandemic digitisation initiatives have spurred on IT modernisation, with 71 percent of organizations reporting to be going through or having been through an IT modernization process, compared to 64 percent in 2019 and 61 percent in 2018.
The companies think that quicker changes to applications can improve time to market for products. More than 90 percent believe it is difficult to change mainframe applications when supporting innovation objectives.
More than 67 percent of decision makers believe their organization’s mainframe holds them back and 58 percent reported being concerned that their business could lose its competitive advantage due to the failure of IT to keep pace with business demands.
More than 88 percent of global IT leaders reported that they are concerned about the skills gap between experienced and junior members of their mainframe teams and modernisation initiatives which allow for the transfer of critical knowledge from mainframe professionals to junior colleagues.
More than 80 percent of respondents stated that if applications written in legacy languages could be placed into a modern development environment, their organization’s new generation of developers could learn to manage them.
Organizations are overwhelmingly choosing the cloud as a target environment for mainframe workloads, emphasizing the growing recognition of cloud environments as a viable platform to grow and transform critical IT assets.
Cloud now has the highest proportion of IT modernisation development occurring and has seen a substantial rise since 2018 (47 percent in 2021 vs 32 percent in 2019 and 27 percent in 2018).
Furthermore, 82 percent of respondents say they would use public and/or hybrid cloud deployment models if they were to move their organization’s applications off the mainframe.
LzLabs CEO Thilo Rockmann said that the report’s findings show that global organisations are ready to embrace modern, open platforms for their critical mainframe application assets.
“It is encouraging to see a much greater awareness of the benefits of unlocking these critical mainframe applications, but procrastinating on these projects is no longer an option. Organisations must embrace change to remain competitive and facilitate the transfer of critical mainframe knowledge to the new technical workforce of tomorrow.”