A Platform-Smart Approach to Mainframe Modernization

1 min. read

Insights from Gartner® on evaluating workload placement and migration strategies

While industry hype often pushes total mainframe exits, large-scale enterprise environments require a more nuanced, platform-smart approach to avoid unnecessary risk. The Gartner research provides actionable insights for matching mission-critical workloads to the right infrastructure, at the right time, we feel helping you balance the unmatched stability of the mainframe with the dynamic scalability of distributed cloud environments.

Key insight from Gartner

The mainframe is best suited for applications that support stable business processes, have a long-expected life span and demand high security and high-volume transactional integrity. Conversely, the cloud and distributed environments are more appropriate for applications that change rapidly, require significant burst-in scalability and are geographically dispersed.1"

Modernization succeeds when you align your technology choices with business reality, ensuring every workload runs where it safely delivers the greatest value.

And as you make those choices, consider Rocket® Software’s replatforming and refactoring solutions for a cost-effective, low-risk, and minimally disruptive path to modernizing mainframe applications and code. Using proven automation and modern tooling, Rocket streamlines application analysis, development, testing, replatforming, and refactoring across mainframe, distributed, cloud, and hybrid environments—platform smart. 

For more information, see: Rocket® Software Enterprise Suite.

Read the full Gartner research report here

 

¹ Gartner, Too Big to Fail: Why Mainframe Exit Projects Are Likely to Fail in the Age of Generative AI, By Dennis Smith, Alessandro Galimberti, and Tobi Bet., April 2026.

Gartner is a trademark of Gartner, Inc. and/or its affiliates.
 

gartner report screenshot
Read the report

Related posts

Data

How Are You Benchmarking Your Bank’s IT Modernization Strategy?

3 min read
Banks face mounting pressure from digital disruption, regulatory changes, and rising customer expectations. The Modernization Index, an assessment tool [...]
How Are You Benchmarking Your Bank’s IT Modernization Strategy?
Data Integration

IDC MarketScape 2025 Vendor Assessment

1 min read
Rocket named a “Vendor to Watch” in IDC MarketScape 2025 Vendor Assessment
IDC MarketScape 2025 Vendor Assessment
See all insights