Mainframe migration with the public cloud

Many enterprises are moving their mainframe workloads to the cloud to take advantage of factors such as 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 that are used by a number of subsystems or are directly called by other applications. In these cases, changes made to the underlying programs also affect the associated subsystems and applications.

For legacy applications, you need to take an incremental approach, where the migration is planned in waves, as a best practice. This approach helps to reduce risks because you select and prioritize closely related applications to be migrated together. However, this approach...