A global survey of 1,000 executives and IT professionals that rely on mainframes found 70% are now employing DevOps processes to build and deploy applications on the venerable platform, with 60% of those respondents now deploying applications faster. A full 80% of respondents also wanted to deploy mainframe applications faster, according to the survey.
The survey also found that integration of IT processes across mainframes and distributed computing environments has increased, with well over half (57%) now sharing platform operations roles. A total of 44% reported site reliability engineering (SRE) as a shared role that spans both platforms.
Applications developed in-house are being delivered faster than a year ago, reinforcing the mainframe’s business value, with 76% realizing value in under 12 months.
More than half of respondents (53%) said their organizations is also implementing DevSecOps practices in a way that spans all those platforms. The top priority for organizations that have mainframes is security and compliance (67%), the survey also found.
Nearly a third have also adopted artificial intelligence for IT operations (AIOps) across mainframes and distributed computing platforms. Survey respondents that have adopted both mainframe AIOps and DevOps reported they are gaining visibility into service issues 70% faster, with 41% improving uptime and availability, according to the survey.
Finally, the survey found 95% of respondents still had a positive perception of the mainframe as a platform for running applications, with 62% reporting transaction volumes on the mainframe are increasing. More than half (55%) also noted workload volatility and unpredictability is increasing. A similar percentage (55%) also reported more than half of their data is on a mainframe.
John McKenny, senior vice president and general manager for Intelligent Z mainframe optimization and transformation at BMC, said IT teams in a downturn are, as usual, trying get the most out of their existing investments. The thing that is changing most is the mainframe is now becoming more integrated with distributed computing environments as IT teams strive to achieve that goal, he added.
In general, there’s still much work to be done in terms of furthering adoption of DevOps best practices in mainframe environments, noted McKenny. Each organization will most likely determine at what level to apply those practices based on the frequency at which applications running on mainframes need to be updated. There are still plenty of applications running on mainframes that might not need to be updated for many years, but as organizations embrace digital business transformation initiatives, the need to update mainframe applications more frequently has increased, noted McKenny.
Regardless of the type of application deployed, it’s apparent that the days when mainframes were managed in isolation from the rest of a distributed computing environment are slowly coming to an end. A mainframe is, arguably, just another node for deploying applications. The one major difference is that, as platforms are considered, the mainframe is a lot more secure, said McKenny.
The challenge and the opportunity now, of course, is as much about changing attitudes toward the mainframe as it is making the right DevOps tools available to the IT teams tasked with managing heterogeneous IT environments.