Mainframes are still hard at work processing over 70% of the world’s most essential computing transactions every day. But high-cost, monolithic architectures and a lack of in-house expertise remain key challenges. Companies fall short of their newer and more agile counterparts due to a major roadblock — legacy systems. CIOs are well-aware of the existential threat of a slow transformation, but modernizing legacy systems is not a simple task.

Organizations migrate and modernize mainframes to the cloud, such as Amazon Web Services (AWS) for many reasons. Agility, time to market, diminishing COBOL developers, move from structured programming to event processing, reducing technical debt, are just a few reasons to modernize the mainframe footprint.

In this discussion, we will examine the many ways to approach modernization and the many decisions that are needed to arrive at the right strategy organizations. We plan to highlight success factors needed for a successful mainframe modernization approach using several patterns, while focusing on a native build approach using flow architecture. The most talked topic involving Mainframe modernizations involve the following:

  1. Unlock the power of real-time, streaming data on the mainframe.
  2. Integrate with legacy CICS applications

  3. Bridge mainframe to cloud.

This is a discussion for those who want to learn more about cost savings, and performance enhancement and who want to modernize their environment, but can't rip and replace in its entirety.

Additional Resources of Interest

Current 2022, the next generation of Kafka Summit Use Promo Code: PRMFME for a discounted pass.

Confluent Cloud Trial - Set Your Data in Motion with Confluent Cloud. Confluent makes it easy to connect your apps, data systems, and entire organization with real-time data flows and processing. Get started with Confluent, for free and new signups receive $400 to spend during their first 60 days.

Get Started in Building Your Information Backbone with Confluent and Ness Digital Engineering - Get Started

Mainframe Modernization - Tips, Tricks, and Tutorials

Modernization is Not Just a Technology Problem by Ness Digital Engineering

Developer Resources - The easiest way to learn Apache Kafka® and Event Streaming.

Cloud has drastically changed the data analytics space as new technology has decoupled storage from compute to power new analytics, ranging from traditional BI to machine learning. Cloud data warehouses like Snowflake, Databricks, Redshift, Synapse, and BigQuery are driving scalable, cost-effective analytics and reporting, and many organizations are looking to migrate away from legacy on-premises solutions (Teradata, Oracle, Cloudera, etc.) towards the cloud to take advantage of these new technologies.

By working with Confluent and Ness, organizations now have the opportunity to rethink how to populate these new data warehouses (DW). Instead of being left with traditional choices such as batch files, ETL, and legacy messaging, they can modernize their data movement architecture by connecting data across any environment (cloud or on-prem).

Data platform modernization is an integral component of most digital transformation initiatives. Kafka streaming capabilities can be a key element of these data warehouse and data lake modernization projects, enabling more efficient, performant, and cost effective data pipelines."

Join us for this discussion to understand why Confluent’s data in motion platform is helping organizations connect hybrid and multi cloud data to their cloud data warehouse of choice in real-time.

Discussion and demonstration introduces the the benefits of modernization including:

- Reduced time to analytics by connecting data sources (on-prem and cloud) into your data warehouse without writing code.

- Normalize, enrich and transform your source data in real-time before it is written to the data warehouse.

- Future proof your architecture and gain increased overall flexibility and business agility.

Modernizing your data warehouse doesn’t need to be a multi year lift and shift. 

Additional Resources of Interest

Confluent Cloud Trial - Set Your Data in Motion with Confluent Cloud. Confluent makes it easy to connect your apps, data systems, and entire organization with real-time data flows and processing. Get started with Confluent, for free and new signups receive $400 to spend during their first 60 days.

IDC Tech Brief: Why Real-Time Streaming Technology Is Critical to Innovation and Gaining a Competitive Advantage

Make your data warehouse real-time with Confluent 

Use Cases:

- KeyBank Fuels National Digital Bank Initiative with Data in Motion and Confluent
- Nuuly Completes Flawless Launch of its New Clothing Rental Subscription Service with Confluent Cloud

Microservices architecture enables organizations to evolve their systems away from the slow and unresponsive shared-state architectures of the past. Event-driven microservices decouple systems, teams, and products and streamline application development. In this session, take a deep dive into how you can use Confluent Cloud to explore event-driven architectures as well as how they are being applied across industries.

This data must be evaluated against the seven common migration strategies (7 Rs) for moving applications to the Cloud. These strategies are re-host, re-platform, re-refactor, re-purchase, retire, retain, re-orchestrate.