‘Mainframe is dead!’ has long been a cry within the IT industry but the reality is, many organisations still rely heavily upon mainframes with data sitting on them around the 12EB (yes, exabyte) mark and growing at approximately 10-20% per year.

This is especially true in financial services where still a lot of the ‘crown jewels’ are kept. Mainframe is not going anywhere fast, but with technology advancements now is the time to consider how to modernise the data that is used by the mainframe. 

In an industry where trust is key for its customers and data is such a core asset, ensuring appropriate levels of protection against cyber threats and malware – regardless of where the data sits – is a must for any financial services organisation. The obvious and easiest environment to focus on is Open Systems, but mainframes can hold extremely important data. 

Now is the time to really understand the art of the possible around mainframe data.

What is possible?

Cyber threats continue to increase, costs rise at rates never seen before, skills become harder to find and every financial services organisation is trying to get that competitive edge on the ever-increasing competition. 

Trying to focus on all these important drivers in such a heavily siloed environment can be extremely challenging and result in organisations either not utilising their data fully, implementing solutions that can cause costs to spiral or leaving themselves open to potential data security issues. 

Benefits and opportunities

For organisations that look to modernise their mainframe data, there can be real benefits and opportunities such as:

• Cost savings: the fundamental way in which protecting mainframe data, whether that be against cyber threats or more traditional backup and restore, can incur heavy costs.  Modernising the approach can help greatly reduce costs.
• Access to greater amounts of valuable data: mainframes hold so much valuable customer data, but traditional methods of storing it can result in very siloed environments and costly methods of making this available in large quantities to data analytics and AI services result in its limited use. By modernising the data from mainframes, it is possible to allow greater access to services that can add more business value and provide better insights.

As the industry evolves over the next 3-5 years, data is becoming more of an important topic and resource. Being able to realise the value of the data becomes and increasing priority. Breaking down traditional silos and modernising the data without having to totally re-design whole environments allow financial services organisations the ability to tap into this more quickly.

There is so much potential in the data associated with mainframes – potential risk as well as reward. By modernising this data, financial organisations can better protect against these risks as well as unlock the potential business value of it.