Reducing Costs & Improving Outcomes Through Mainframe Optimization
March 6, 2023
Multiple economic and sociological factors, including market instability, rising inflation, and fears of a recession, have forced business decision-makers worldwide to make hard decisions to cut costs. Despite these challenges and constricting budgets, IT spending continued to grow in 2022—with no signs of slowing down in 2023.
According to Gartner, IT spending worldwide is estimated to grow by 2.4% in 2023 to over $4.5 trillion. This is down from the previous quarter’s forecast of 5.1% growth. While inflation and other factors continue to erode consumer purchasing power and drive device spending down, overall enterprise IT spending looks to remain strong. And, where organizations decide to focus that spending matters—especially mission-critical organizations that rely on mainframe infrastructure.
The Mainframe Impact on Costs
The mainframe remains the preferred platform for running business-critical applications and processing large volumes of structured transaction data. Its technology is often one of the first platforms IT and business leaders narrow in on when looking to reduce operating costs. Some take this to mean that a wholesale migration of mainframe properties to private or public cloud environments is necessary. However, this couldn't be further from the truth in most cases.
Rip and replace cloud migration approaches can quickly become a high-cost, and even higher-risk maneuver, that only moves a business’s problems (e.g., costs, skills, agility) to a new destination while creating new challenges around things like security, compliance, and latency. Instead, enterprises today are introducing hybrid cloud environments to business operations by implementing modernization tools that optimize mainframe performance and capacity—helping enterprises cut costs while continuing to utilize their mainframe investments.
Reducing Costs Through Mainframe Optimization
With ongoing economic challenges, rather than looking for ways to retire mainframe technology, zSystems businesses are taking a hybrid cloud approach that optimizes the mainframe in order to account for growing and evolving data, business, and consumer needs.
An organization’s ability to accelerate digital change depends on the health of its infrastructure, especially the mainframe. For many enterprises, mission-critical value streams are rooted in the mainframe. As digital change accelerates, mainframe workloads and data can be modernized to grow and support that change. This highlights the importance of evolving how to monitor mainframe health to ensure optimal performance and capacity while containing costs. Failure to effectively maintain performance and capacity puts businesses at risk of derailing digital transformations and dissolving stakeholders’ confidence.
Ensuring this doesn’t happen to an organization requires the right solutions in place that enable IT professionals to successfully manage mainframe performance. With the right tools, IT can eliminate its business environment’s dependence on expensive, hard-to-find expertise; provide leaders with the insights needed to improve decision-making; and continue to leverage and extend long-term investments in the reliability, availability, and security of the business’s mainframe infrastructure—helping it become just another platform in the hybrid cloud strategy.
Rocket Software is the trusted advisor for critical business decisions around mainframe performance, scalability, and capacity planning. With over 30 years of mainframe experience and the collective intelligence of industry experts standing by, Rocket Software is the only choice for mission-critical organizations looking to reduce costs without disruptions through mainframe optimization.
Learn more about the benefits of optimizing mainframe performance and capacity with Rocket Software.
