Mainframe systems have supported thousands of enterprises for decades, providing a robust technology core, powering critical applications, and enabling businesses to perform complex tasks at scale. But as time goes on, these legacy systems are becoming harder to maintain, more expensive to run, and a significant barrier to organizational evolution.
Cost constraints, skills shortages, and outdated technology all contribute to slow development cycles. They impede innovation, prevent organizations from seizing emerging opportunities to drive revenue, and slow adoption of new technologies and customer experiences.
Plus, even if you can overcome those challenges and bring new capabilities and experiences to market through your mainframe, everything you build only adds to its complexity — compounding the issue even further.
If your organization is one of thousands that still rely on mainframe technology, these challenges won’t be new to you. Most leaders in your position have accepted the need to either modernize their mainframes or move toward decommissioning them. But that’s a huge step, and one that carries significant cost, complexity, and risk.
However, there is another, simpler way to get started on the journey of mainframe modernization: data replication.
Take the first step toward mainframe modernization with data replication
Data replication enables specific business logic and data to be decoupled from your mainframe, making it accessible in a cloud environment. Rather than moving your entire mainframe environment into the cloud, you select a small and relevant part of it to replicate there.
This approach enables product teams to start harnessing all of the benefits cloud can deliver — from enabling the rapid adoption of leading technologies to accelerating time to market — without adding to the complexity of the mainframe itself.
At Thoughtworks, we’ve used data replication to deliver new operational cost savings, create engaging self-service customer experiences, and enable analytics off-mainframe in an elastic environment.
It’s an increasingly popular strategy among leaders who want a fast way to sidestep many of the challenges mainframes create, because it offers opportunities to:
Build new revenue streams and products at speed and start seeing the benefits of mainframe modernization quickly
- Prove the value and ROI that wider modernization could deliver and secure essential buy-in to get mainframe decommissioning projects off the ground
- Adopt specific new capabilities or strategies that are being blocked by the inadequacies of mainframe systems
However, to implement it effectively, organizations need three key things.
The three keys to successful data replication
Appropriate coupling
When you’re replicating data, it's crucial to control the level of coupling between your legacy system and your new cloud applications. Otherwise, you could end replicating the complexity of your mainframe environment too and make it harder to modernize in the future.
Don't simply replicate data everywhere. Instead, present a new schema and hide it behind anti-corruption layer services to minimize the need for future changes.
For event-driven systems, you can adapt the replication stream to business events using a form of loose event interception that decouples future applications from the mainframe schema.
Relevant skills and expertise
Cloud data replication requires specific expertise in data tools like Precisely and Qlik, and input from your mainframe SMEs. Getting your new tooling set up on the mainframe and replicating data efficiently to the cloud demand deep knowledge of the tools themselves as well as cloud datastores and technology.
The right cloud environment
It isn’t just how you replicate data that impacts what your organization gets out of replication — it’s where you replicate it to. You should replicate your data to an appropriate cloud environment that isn’t just a good fit for the specific product you’re building today, but will also serve as a strong platform for future products and offloaded capabilities.
Thoughtworks, AWS, and Precisely: Bringing leading tools, expertise, and cloud technology together to enable data replication success
Recently, Amazon Web Services partnered with Precisely to launch AWS Mainframe Modernization Data Replication with Precisely. Now, Thoughtworks has been named as a Launch Partner for Precisely on AWS, bringing our deep data replication and mainframe modernization expertise to this powerful collaboration.
Our partnership brings together everything organizations need to free themselves from the constraints of mainframe technologies, build new revenue streams and products at speed, and prove the ROI of mainframe modernization.
If you're ready to explore mainframe modernization and harness the power of data replication for your organization, contact us at mainframe-practice@thoughtworks.com and take the first step in your mainframe to cloud journey.
Disclaimer: The statements and opinions expressed in this article are those of the author(s) and do not necessarily reflect the positions of Thoughtworks.
