Techolution covers the pervasive challenge of technical debt on our blog because it’s the single biggest barrier to digital transformation. Application and workload migration to the cloud are the cornerstone on which most businesses build their version of digital transformation that is focused on improving business outcomes in tangible ways.

Mainframes remain a crucial element to many industry sectors with a reported 10,00 mainframes in use around the globe. Despite being vital to sectors like healthcare, finance, insurance, retail, government, and others, they are expensive to own and maintain. They also tend to carry a great deal of technical debt as legacy technology because they bring enormous challenges to enacting digital transformations across enterprises.

Making legacy technology such as mainframes compatible with the cloud is something all these sectors need to solve to remain competitive. Infrastructure and Operations (I&O) leaders who manage and reduce technical debt will achieve at least 50 percent faster service delivery times to the business, according to Gartner Research.

Google Cloud Platform (GCP) has a new automatic mainframe migration system called G4 to overcome that technical debt standing in the way of cloud migration. There is still a considerable amount of work that goes into preparing for and using G4. The big benefit is that it changes the game for time and cost-effective mainframe migration.

Businesses must weigh many costs associated with digital transformation. But saving millions of dollars in annual mainframe support and licensing fees outweigh the costs of a challenging transition in almost every case. The ability to migrate mainframe applications and workloads to the cloud can net savings of 40 to 80 percent in recovered licensing costs, operations, and application maintenance, according to the latest Google/ ISG Report on mainframe migrations to the cloud.

Business Benefits of Mainframe Migration

In our latest webinar video on G4 and retiring technical debt quickly, you’ll see how our approach to modernizing in place works via a simplified overview. The main takeaway for CTOs and other business stakeholders is to show how this process with G4 works. This is not only possible but is an integral part of Techolution’s modernize-in-place approach that we have successfully performed many times for startups to global enterprises across many sectors.

Techolution, GCP and G4

As a trusted Google Partner, Techolution is one of a growing handful of partners that have the managed cloud services teams with the expertise and experience to support businesses in mainframe migration. Our process works collaboratively with GCP and G4 to perform the following broad steps:

• Performing a discovery process on your business’ legacy systems to assess the languages and databases supporting your environments
• Build out an automated code conversion template using G4 tools
• Deploy a more modern code language such as Java or others, which we can then deploy into Techolution’s microservices architecture on GCP.

Once complete, the process gets business mainframes 80 to 90 percent of the way to a GCP-based microservices environment. The remaining 10 to 20 percent of a mainframe migration may depend on the application and may take more time to overcome.

This process ensures that most of your mainframe application and workload (like databases) will now work in the cloud via containers and microservices. Your organization can now reap major cost savings and major application and services innovation benefits that make you more competitive. You now have the path forward to getting out of the legacy database mindset in a way that gets your application into the cloud.

GCP, G4 and the Techolution team have a proven path forward to getting mainframe workloads, databases and applications to the cloud running on an instance in our own data center with Kubernetes. Techolution knows how to use multiple solutions that can support business outcomes via cloud migration using tools like Anthos, OpenShift, and Platform9, among others. These solutions support managed Kubernetes instances that can run in these environments. To learn more about G4 and how Techolution can be your ideal partner for:

• Reducing technical debt by modernizing in place
• Migrating to the cloud
• Achieving real business outcomes through digital transformation,

You can get more information on Google’s G4 tool here.

Fill out the form if you’d like to set up a meeting to discuss mainframe migration using G4. We will collaborate with you on reaching your cloud modernization goals.