Survey confirms mainframe as innovation platform

BMC has published findings from its annual mainframe survey1 that reinforce the mainframe as a key platform for innovation. Organisations are bringing the mainframe to more of the enterprise, and digital transformation is increasingly inclusive of the mainframe. The insights align with the company’s focus on providing intelligence-driven solutions that span all IT and business environments from mainframe to the cloud.

Ninety-five percent of the more than 1000 executive and technical professionals surveyed have a positive perception of mainframes and state that the mainframe is a long-term platform that is growing and adding new workloads. In addition, perceptions of mainframe technologies, the ability of mainframes to serve enterprise data-driven use cases and practices, and usage capacity have increased over the last year.

AIOps and DevOps increase resiliency for mainframe organisations

Mainframes play a valuable role in enterprise innovation to deliver real-world results. The survey shows that adopters of AIOps and DevOps are seeing clear value from their investments, and the adoption of new tools and processes in key areas like DevOps, DevSecOps, and AIOps all increased from the previous year.

In AIOps, adoption is growing as implementation barriers decline. The mainframe is moving firmly into enterprise AIOps, as witnessed by the decreased use in non-mainframe environments and increased use in combined environments. The adoption of DevOps on the mainframe also continues to be a trend, as DevOps and collaboration deliver real-world results. According to the survey:

Sixty-five percent of respondents report the combined use of AIOps in their mainframe and distributed environments. With the increase in AIOps adoption, more enterprises include mainframes in their enterprise wide AIOps initiatives, reinforcing the mainframe as a valuable platform for innovation

More than twice as many respondents this year reported no challenges implementing AIOps on the mainframe, with the expense of implementation dropping by 8 percent over last year

Seventy percent of large organisations reported DevOps use within their mainframe environment

Silos between teams are declining, and collaboration is increasing, with 53 percent of respondents sharing DevSecOps roles – and 57 percent sharing platform ops roles – across mainframe and distributed environments

Forty-four percent report site reliability engineering (SRE) as a shared role that includes the mainframe

Mainframe AIOps and DevOps adopters point to increased enterprise resiliency, with 70 percent reporting faster visibility into service issues. Applications developed in-house are being delivered faster than a year ago, reinforcing the mainframe’s business value, with 76 percent realising value in under 12 months

 Security and compliance lead mainframe priorities

For the third year, security and compliance lead the list of priorities for mainframe organisations, with 67 percent of respondents citing these as top issues, a 6 percent increase over last year. These priorities demonstrate a growing awareness of the need to effectively secure mainframe environments, although most businesses have not moved fast enough to adopt countermeasures or effective practices. As a result, privileged user monitoring and sharing event data with enterprise Security Information and Event Management (SIEM) have declined in production environments.

“The growth of mainframe innovation continues,” said John McKenny, senior vice president and general manager, Intelligent Z Optimisation and Transformation at BMC. “While significant progress is being made in implementing DevOps and AIOps, there’s still a need to train staff to accelerate and more quickly realise the benefits. Slow rollouts today can lead to a lost competitive edge tomorrow. Now is the time to consider professional services to fill short-term needs.”

“The survey points to enterprises needing to prioritise SIEM integration for real-time visibility of mainframe threat events to help prevent data theft, loss, or business disruptions,” continued John McKenny. “As the mainframe becomes a more integral part of enterprise security initiatives like Zero Trust, it will be imperative to prioritise best practice alignment across teams. C-level executives need to back and invest in these efforts to fast-track improvements and embrace automation.”