Mainframe migration with the public cloud

Many enterprises are moving their mainframe workloads to the cloud to take advantage of cost reduction, increased agility, technical debt reduction, digital strategy support, the legacy mainframe skills gap, and data analytics. Mainframe workloads are more challenging to migrate than x86-based workloads because legacy mainframe applications are often developed and deployed in a tightly coupled manner. For example, a mainframe application might include programs used by several subsystems or directly called by other applications. In these cases, changes made to the underlying programs also affect the associated subsystems and applications.

Transitioning from mainframe systems to the cloud presents a unique opportunity, even though cloud providers may not support the exact mainframe hardware architecture. For organizations, this transition involves strategic choices: they can emulate mainframe environments on x86 platforms or refactor their...