A global Fortune 100 company needed to reduce their mainframe dependencies due to increasing outages that were significantly impacting business operations. Several critical business operations are dependent on the mainframe computer, so a modernization effort was initiated to improve application resiliency, reduce business risk, and lower operating costs.
Two Roads guided the mainframe modernization from initial discovery through deployment. After developing a quantitative model to inform prioritization and working with stakeholders to ensure cross-functional alignments, the firm identified 100+ mainframe dependent applications that needed modernization. The firm then re-platformed critical applications onto next-gen technology, de-coupled key functions where possible, and de-risked the remaining mainframe applications by simplifying processing and improving recovery.
The modernization effort realized business value through a structured program with governance, process monitoring, and collaboration with resources from application teams, infrastructure services, the mainframe and the business. By prioritizing application renewals according to business criticality vs. migration complexity, the team was able to identify quick wins and deliver immediate value.
The program improved operational resiliency by successfully removing the majority of mainframe dependencies, unlocking additional business capabilities through re-platforming, and reducing risk of mission critical applications.
The Outcome
- Improved operational reliability by reducing mainframe dependent applications by ~70% over 3 years
- Unlocked business capabilities and reduced risks for mission critical applications through re-platforming
- Optimized workloads remaining on mainframe by removing 25,000 “dead-code” (irrelevant) components and fine-tuning long-running jobs
