Mainframes play a crucial role in enterprise architecture but often go underappreciated.

They are essential for 93% of businesses managing finances and 73% handling customer transactions, making them a key part of many hybrid cloud strategies.

Despite their importance, modernizing mainframes can be challenging. Gartner research shows many organizations struggle to align modernization efforts with their IT strategies. A major concern is the fear of downtime or service disruptions, which can harm customer experiences and reduce revenue.

In fact, a Rocket Software and Forrester survey found that one-third of businesses see modernization as highly disruptive.

Read on as we explore non-disruptive mainframe modernization and share strategies to upgrade legacy systems while maintaining seamless operations.

Strategies to Modernize Mainframe Applications Without Interruption

Here are several ways to modernize mainframe applications without disrupting the existing IT ecosystem:

1. Assess Your Current System and Business Needs

Before starting any modernization effort, it’s important to assess existing mainframe environment and core systems to identify potential issues and areas for improvement.

This assessment can help identify the mission-critical applications that cannot afford any downtime, understand the scope of the overall project, and develop a clear plan for moving forward.

Here are a few important things to consider when assessing existing mainframe system and business needs for modernization:

• Capabilities and limitations: Make sure to identify current mainframe system’s capabilities, limitations, and dependencies.
• Risks involved: Make an effort to understand various potential risks and how to mitigate them.
• Estimation of costs: Estimate the different costs associated with the process of mainframe modernization.
• Alignment of strategic goals: Lastly, make sure that businesses align to mainframe modernization efforts with their respective strategic goals.
• Based on the assessment above, we can develop a mainframe modernization strategy that aligns with respective business goals and objectives.

2. Adopt a Phased Modernization Approach

Modernizing any legacy application can be a very complex task. The most overwhelming part of this type of modernization is ensuring smooth user movement of legacy services to the new modernized systems.

To navigate this effectively, organizations need to take a phased and more systematic modernization approach. This means breaking the entire process into various small, manageable phases to minimize risk.

The best way to do this is to follow a strangler pattern, which ensures the incremental movement of a legacy mainframe application by replacing existing applications and systems with new services step-by-step.

The two things that need to be taken care of

• Initial load phase: It helps ensure that all data (operational and configurational) needed for the new service to fully operate in production are available in the new system/application/platform.
• Synchronization: This means achieving a seamless sync between the new and outdated systems to maintain high data integrity between individual applications or functions.

It is also important to remember to always tackle non-critical applications first, thus ensuring that essential operations remain unaffected. We can also create a structured and detailed timeline that allows for parallel modernization and operation of the mainframe system.

3. Use API-Driven Modernization

API-driven modernization of mainframe applications involves developing and maintaining a scalable and secure interface layer that allows seamless communication between different systems and services without replacing the core one.

This is a strategic approach that enables enterprises to get the maximum out of their mainframe applications without any sort of interruption.

By implementing API-powered modernization, organizations can ensure that their mainframe systems can seamlessly interact with all modern applications and cloud services, thus allowing them to modernize without causing disruptions.

Advantages of API-driven modernization

• API-driven modernization of mainframe enables enterprises to seamlessly integrate their mainframe applications with the latest systems while keeping the integrity and security of the mainframe data intact.
• Since it doesn’t need for significant modifications to the mainframe system, the technique is considerably less problematic than other modernization strategies.
• APIs offer a standardized interface that allows various systems to communicate effectively and can be developed quickly and efficiently.

Bonus Tip: Consider adopting API versioning to ensure backward compatibility during modernization. This allows business to introduce new features or upgrades without disrupting existing services, making it easier to evolve enterprise systems gradually while maintaining stable operations for their users.

4. Consider a Hybrid Cloud Strategy

An increasing number of enterprises are adopting a hybrid approach to get the best of both the mainframe and the cloud. This allows them to leverage the reliability and security of mainframe systems along with the flexibility and analytical capabilities of cloud environments.

This strategy goes beyond modernization; it aligns with broader business goals and how an organization aims to leverage its data. By integrating mainframe data with the cloud, enterprises can unlock real-time insights and enhance operational management across the organization.

To navigate this effectively, gradually migrate workloads to the cloud using a hybrid approach. Non-critical applications move first, and mission-critical ones remain on-premise until stability is ensured. This allows businesses to take advantage of cloud benefits while also keeping essential operations uninterrupted.

5. Leverage Automated Refactoring Tools

A recent survey of almost 83% of IT executives confirmed that app modernization is critical to building and executing business strategies. Therefore, it becomes important for executives to understand how they want to modernize their legacy apps.

One of the best ways to do this is to pick the right code refactoring tool that can play a key role in the process. Refactoring refers to the process of code restructuring combining reverse and forward engineering to enable enhanced performance and portability, ensuring that enterprise applications run significantly faster in the future.

This methodology’s key highlight is that it keeps systems’ business logic and core functionality intact and is mainly carried out using automated tools available for multiple languages and platforms.

These automated tools can refactor legacy application code into various modern languages, such as Java or.NET, with human in loop customization, ensuring 100% modernization and lowering the risk of downtime.

In addition, there are several other benefits of using automated refactoring tools, including:

• Higher Scalability: Refactoring breaks down legacy infrastructure into smaller, scalable services, maintaining core functionality while improving agility and scalability.
• Reduced Tech Debt: These tools help reduce architectural tech debt by providing a clearer, more structured understanding of the code, making refactoring more efficient and minimizing hidden costs.
• Improved Developer Productivity: By automating research, analysis, and other tasks, refactoring tools enhance the developer experience, leading to higher productivity and better talent retention.

Wrapping Up

Mainframe modernization is becoming increasingly essential for enterprises that depend on legacy mainframe applications for their core business operations. This process offers numerous benefits, such as reduced costs, improved efficiency, and a significant competitive edge in the market.

Although the process of non-disruptive mainframe modernization can be quite complex and challenging, implementing the above-mentioned strategies will enable your organization to migrate to modern platforms and technologies without disruption successfully.

If you’re looking to modernize your legacy applications, Kumaran’s Mainframe Modernization solutions can help. With our proprietary tool, NxTran, we automate the refactoring of legacy code to Java and Angular, ensuring a seamless migration to target natural solution. We specialize in transforming mainframe infrastructures to distributed platforms like Linux or Cloud, reducing MIPS usage and IT costs.

Contact us today to learn more about how Kumaran can help you modernize your mainframe systems efficiently and without disruption.