Discussing criticisms of the mainframe, because it remains an integral part of countless global household names.
Technology continues to evolve at an unprecedented pace, with innovations constantly reshaping the enterprise IT landscape. Yet amid decades of rapid transformation, one technology has remained a constant: the mainframe. Despite repeated predictions of its demise, the mainframe continues to serve as the backbone of many of the world’s largest organizations, powering high-volume transaction processing and supporting mission-critical business operations.
Far from becoming obsolete, the strategic importance of the mainframe is growing in the digital era. As enterprises accelerate digital transformation, they increasingly rely on mainframes for the performance, security, scalability, and reliability required to support modern business demands. In fact, 64% of organizations that use mainframes plan to run more than half of their mission-critical workloads on the platform, up from 57% in 2018, a clear indication that the mainframe remains central to enterprise IT strategies.
The mainframe’s exceptional reliability, processing power, scalability, security, and ability to handle high-volume transactions make it indispensable for enterprise organizations. These strengths are the foundation of its continued role in supporting mission-critical applications across industries such as banking, healthcare, insurance, retail, and government.
Despite its proven performance and the growing confidence enterprises place in the platform, misconceptions about the future of the mainframe continue to persist. Critics often label it as outdated or nearing obsolescence, overlooking the significant innovations that have kept it relevant in today’s hybrid, cloud-enabled, and AI-driven IT environments.
Let’s examine some of the most common myths surrounding mainframes and separate perception from reality by exploring the facts behind one of enterprise computing’s most enduring technologies.
- The evolution of IT infrastructure – from mainframe to server-less
Myth 1 – You need to re-platform to take advantage of the cloud
Consumers don’t understand that their mobile banking app is retrieving information from a mainframe and delivering it to their device through an app hosted in the cloud, and they don’t particularly care. The only thing that matters to a customer is that the product or service they’re using is delivered reliably and makes their life easier. To provide the best customer experience, companies need to use the best available platform for the job. While some platforms are better suited to certain tasks than others, no single system is best at everything.
This is why adopting a two-platform, one-speed IT strategy, built on the mainframe and the cloud, makes sense. Both platforms offer their own strengths, and both can run at the same speed with the uncompromised quality that Agile and DevOps processes demand. This empowers development teams to move at the same pace, with the same level of quality, regardless of platform — without the pressure of migrating away from systems that are proven to work.
Some people are quick to jump on the cloud-first bandwagon. But history shows that organizations attempting full migrations off the mainframe often create business disasters for themselves and the customers they serve. Ultimately, a two-platform, one-speed approach is a better, cheaper, and faster way for mainframe-reliant organizations to make innovative progress — compared to the risky alternative of migrating decades of critical data to the cloud.
- Pave the way to the future: modernizing the mainframe
Myth 2 – Mainframe development groups can’t be agile
When it comes to implementing Agile development processes, it’s not simply a matter of whether the hardware is modern enough. The culture, processes, and tools surrounding the platform are just as important as the hardware itself for enterprises trying to improve the speed, quality, and efficiency of their software development and delivery.
Adopting Agile or DevOps practices and modernizing tools and processes makes it possible for developers of any experience level to work with the mainframe. Through this approach, enterprises can rest assured that the platform is easily adaptable to new tools, compatible with new technologies, and crucially accessible to developers who are new to the mainframe. However, there isn’t a one-stop solution to modernizing mainframe software delivery and the tools within it; it’s a journey.
At the start of that journey, replacing obsolete green-screen environments with modern, intuitive interfaces is vital, as this creates an improved developer experience on the mainframe. Organizations can then begin automating complex, repetitive processes, like testing. A comprehensive plan can ultimately allow mainframe development and operations teams to form cross-platform Agile/DevOps teams and start working as part of the broader IT department.
Myth 3 – COBOL contains asbestos
First, COBOL is nothing more than program syntax that, once compiled into machine language, drives computational resources. Of the ever-increasing list of 1,000+ programming languages in the world, no single one is universally best. Every programming language has pros and cons by design. What’s distinctive about COBOL is the compiler. IBM has done a masterful job of continually updating the COBOL compiler every few months. These enhancements fine-tune the resulting machine language so it can most effectively and efficiently drive the newest and greatest computing resources within the engineering marvel that is the mainframe. That’s why the world’s economy truly runs on over 220 billion lines of COBOL code, and that number is increasing every day.
Second, in the Age of Software, code that’s proven to be efficient and effective is one of the best assets an organization can have. Converting proven, working code to unproven Java code will likely increase the lines of code by 50 percent, decrease performance and reliability, increase security risks, and drive up total costs. That’s beyond reckless. Instead, an organization’s precious time, money, and energy should be invested in delivering new features that customers actually care about, and in removing technical debt that will improve future workflows within the software delivery process.
Third, today’s incoming developers are polyglot programmers. By necessity, they’re comfortable working with a range of programming languages, and COBOL is simply another one to add to the list. For COBOL to fit seamlessly into the modern programmer’s skill set, modern DevOps tools are needed to enable developers to work across multiple types of programs with ease and confidence. Fortunately, these tools are readily available and growing in number. A modern IDE, for example, gives developers a familiar and preferred experience in which they can code in nearly any language on most platforms — demonstrating how COBOL can sit comfortably alongside the other languages the modern developer uses frequently.
The modern mainframe reality
The mainframe continues to be an integral part of the IT infrastructure of myriad household names around the world, and, as the famous saying goes, rumors of its death have been greatly exaggerated. However, it can still be difficult for companies to understand how the mainframe fits into their modern IT strategy. Companies don’t need to sacrifice the reliability, security, and power of the mainframe, nor should they have to. By adopting modern tooling and methodologies like Agile Development and DevOps, enterprises can retain the many advantages the mainframe has to offer, integrate the platform with newer technologies, and achieve greater speed, quality, and efficiency in software development and delivery.