As the majority of today’s public sector organizations face the challenge of cutting costs across the board to meet government spending targets, one area that is coming under increasing scrutiny is IT infrastructure. As a result, cost-effective distributed IT platforms and services are being considered as an alternative to the costly proprietary minicomputers and mainframes on which many government organizations have relied for so long.
Today, many critical legacy IT applications within public sector organizations sit on mainframes, which come with consistent annual maintenance and expanding upgrade fees. This has been the case for many years, as it’s always been seen as the most stable and secure environment for hosted applications and managed data.
This view is now starting to shift as “IT agility” also becomes a focus for many as a mechanism to accelerate delivery while reducing expenses—doing more with less. To become “agile” means moving away from closed environments, modernizing applications and moving to new platforms hosted off the mainframe.
The cloud is obviously a hot topic in IT departments worldwide—from the public to the private sector—with many in the public sector looking to move their IT applications to the cloud.
Despite the hype surrounding the return on investment and overall efficiency that the cloud will deliver for IT departments in local governments, there is still much perceived risk. Questions linger regarding the cloud and legacy applications, which have been used for decades. But moving to the cloud doesn’t have to be difficult—this process can be executed without compromising application performance and data integrity.
We now have the ability to move these legacy applications—which have years of organizational value and are heavily relied on daily—to the cloud without losing any of this value or performance. It’s estimated that moving these applications off the mainframe can reduce operating costs by around 60–70%, and using the cloud can go further, garnering huge cost savings. So what is the best way for an organization to move to the cloud?
1. Identify Critical Applications
Technically, a legacy application is one that could have been written as recently as yesterday. There is a considerable amount of legacy around so-called “modern” applications and the languages they are written in. Using APM (application portfolio management) tools is important when modernizing legacy apps for the cloud so that those apps most crucial to the business can be easily identified and appropriately managed to deliver the available cost savings.
2. Prioritize Applications for Migration to the Cloud
Before modernizing legacy applications and moving them to the cloud, it’s important to prioritize which ones need to be modernized versus which you’d like to update, just because.
For this to happen, all applications should be evaluated and charted according to organizational value, cost, impact and use cases. The applications that are most important in terms of value and impact, but that also carry a high cost, are the ones that should be moved to the cloud first. As this charting commences, it’s important to remember that the IT department should work with business departments to ensure that the technology and application roadmaps are on par with the organization’s needs.
3. Old Applications Are Good to Go
Contrary to popular belief, 20-year-old business IT applications written in older languages—such as COBOL—are, in fact, better suited to run in the cloud. These applications were designed to run on server-based environments supporting hundreds of users, manage complex transactions securely and with adequate performance, and be accessed through remote interfaces. In fact, these characteristics mean there is less architectural change needed to move these applications to the cloud compared with other types of applications. Believe it or not, the applications that are hardest to move are those written for client-server models during the 1990’s.
All of this means that mainframe applications that are core to an organization and represent critical business processes—embodying great value—can be moved to the cloud without concern.
4. Don’t Tie Yourself In to a Particular Cloud Hosting Platform
Working with a vendor-neutral migration specialist will make re-hosting applications to an alternate cloud platform easier, should you wish to make a change. Portability should be built into the applications themselves, rather than at the hosting level. This is what is meant by “agile,” as it means IT can be modernized and moved, benefiting from less costly and more efficient platforms. The ability to be agile can have huge future cost-saving implications.
Migrating from Mainframe to Cloud: The Benefits
The migration of all applications from the mainframe can take between nine months to as many as three years, so following these steps and moving at a sensible pace is the key to success. Once complete, it enables a better user experience and the ability to share data in a much more efficient manner. Ultimately, it will mean any chosen user can directly access IT applications from any device.
There are huge benefits to be sought by moving away from a mainframe environment to a more agile and efficient platform, and while it may take time, all government organizations should consider a path to moving their applications. The only alternative is to see public sector IT costs continue to escalate.
About the Author
Stuart McGill, general manager of Borland, Micro Focus
Photo courtesy of cwwycoff1.
