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Retail organizations face an urgent need to accelerate digital transformation efforts in response to economic insecurity, persistent inflation, and growing consumer price sensitivity. Consumer product goods manufacturers (CPGs) and physical and online retail stores need to increase investments in strategic real-time pricing, supply chain resiliency, and customer experience management to keep pace with the competition. With cloud adoption, retailers have been successful and with emerging artificial intelligence (AI) capabilities on cloud, they can break the barriers. 

“Cloud adoption was the need, and AI on cloud is imperative today,” says Nilendu Pattanaik, Global Head Business Applications Practice, Microsoft Business Unit, at Tata Consultancy Services (TCS). “Having hundreds of employees managing on-premises infrastructure is not cost-effective. Cloud adoption normalizes legacy infrastructures, standardizes applications, and reduces redundancies, and AI infuses new possibilities for experience and efficiency.”  

The right cloud platform helps businesses achieve their digital transformation goals. “Our key solutions for retail industries are built on Microsoft Cloud, which combine best-in-class retail and consumer products domain across multiple types of businesses, and process capabilities built by TCS with AI-enabled solutions that leverage Microsoft technologies,” Nilendu says. 

A cloud-first approach to modernization supported by AI should ensure that technology investments are in lockstep with the retailer’s business model and objectives. IT leaders are prioritizing models that are more agile, efficient, and intelligent, allowing them to respond to market changes quickly. The right model facilitates the adoption of new technologies on cloud, provides a framework for collaboration between teams seamlessly, and supports continuous refinements in an agile manner.  

Great expectations 

For all types of retail outlets, be it a website, a mobile app, or a physical store, it is vital to adopt strategies that meet shoppers’ heightened expectations. Customer loyalty and retention depend on it, and the competition is setting a high bar, with retail leaders incorporating AI as well as augmented reality technologies to create hyper-personalized customer experiences.   

These types of technologies require IT architecture and infrastructure that enable increased flexibility and scalability. A more engaging customer experience may be achieved through improving navigation in store-branded mobile app, for example, or by offering an AI-driven feature to help customers determine correct sizing for apparel. 

Small changes can have a big impact on performance. “Even a small reduction in the time it takes to deliver a cup of coffee could have a significant impact on employee productivity and the overall customer experience,” says Nilendu. “Spatial analytics and competitive analysis have started to play critical roles in driving differentiated experience, dynamic pricing strategy, store layouts and improved personalized buying experiences.”  

Supply chain resiliency  

Maintaining a competitive position in the retail world involves tremendous pressure to manage costs more effectively. Supply chain resiliency can help reduce disruptions, streamline inventory management, and improve operational efficiency. With AI and Microsoft Cloud, the right product at the right time can be supplied, stocked, sold, and served with a superior impact. 

“An AI-enabled, resilient and digital supply chain is one of the key focus areas for TCS to take to the market,” Nilendu says. “Similarly, this is one of the key platforms from Microsoft Dynamics 365 for the retail industry, and with Microsoft Dynamics 365 Copilot in both ERP and CRM, the solutions have now got wings of intelligence for smart selling and hyper-personalized experience. Hence, we have created a smart and resilient supply chain framework on Microsoft Cloud for Retail integrated with Microsoft Dynamics 365 and Microsoft Dynamics Point of Sales, powered with Microsoft Power Platform and Microsoft Azure OpenAI, to help retailers transform across the entire value chain.” 

As retailers transform, privacy and security of consumer data must remain the top priority. “Security and compliance are paramount for retail businesses because they’re dealing with so much personally identifiable information (PII) and need to be competitively ahead while being compliant,” says Nilendu. “It is extremely important to manage that data privacy at the highest security level. Normalizing your data infrastructure on Microsoft Cloud allows you to manage security and compliance across multiple geographies more effectively through one major security framework.” 

Retailers are under pressure to transform into more responsive and resilient organizations to meet broader competition and rapidly changing customer expectations. A cloud-first approach supported by next-generation technologies powered with AI can help transform operations, optimize inventory, store operation, market outreach and supply chain management, and enhance customer experiences to deliver sustainable growth while staying compliant, maintaining security, and preventing fraud. 

Learn how to master your cloud transformation journey with TCS and Microsoft Cloud. 

Cloud Computing, Digital Transformation, Retail Industry

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Most organizations are already well under way with their digital transformation journeys, particularly data modernization. For most companies, the drive for data modernization is attributed to the massive growth of data and a business goal to harness as much data as possible to unlock its potential in transformative ways. Adopting cloud-based solutions is, perhaps, one of the most popular means of modernizing. Moving data into a cloud-based environment enables faster data sharing, improves workflows, and can ease workloads on mainframe systems and data centers.

But moving critical infrastructure out of the data center is a process that is easier said than done. Anytime data moves from one environment to another, risks and security threats become a real possibility. For businesses that operate in highly regulated industries or handle large amounts of sensitive customer data, considerations around the potential for regulatory violations or data breaches make getting the modernization process done securely critical.

When executed poorly, data modernization can leave organizations with a jumbled mess of data, adding to workloads, sapping productivity and workflows, and harming employee and customer satisfaction. Businesses need both the right tools and partners to make cloud migration easier and move data quickly without sacrificing security. Here are four important questions IT leaders should ask themselves when it comes to data modernization.

How accessible is your data to employees?

An important part of any data modernization initiative is eliminating data siloes to improve decision making and customer experience. But the business of digital transformation often has the opposite effect, at least in the short term. As new technologies are implemented and data migrates, new pockets of siloed data can emerge, necessitating the use of multiple applications and systems to keep everything in line.

Employees need secure, remote access to the data that drives the business while this migration is happening—and after. With many modernization efforts taking a hybrid approach, businesses need to ensure they are leveraging tools that eliminate siloes and connect applications across environments. Using technologies that support a hybrid environment makes it easier to modernize with less disruption, improving workloads, keeping data accessible and ultimately driving greater revenue.

Is content management getting in the way of productivity?

Enterprises store a vast amount of data. When it comes to effective data governance, relying on manual processes can hinder productivity while also leaving businesses exposed to regulatory violations, human errors, and missed revenue opportunities. The amount of data moving across an enterprise is only going to increase as more innovation and disruption emerge. Ensuring content management systems are up to the task can be the difference between success or costly mistakes.

Incorporating intelligent automation into content management should be a top priority in every data modernization journey. Adding automation gives data professionals an extra level of support, reducing workloads, streamlining workflows, and jumpstarting productivity. Easing the strain on data management teams can help improve data quality and keep businesses one step ahead of the market.

What are your compliance needs?

Many enterprises are sitting on a trove of highly sensitive data and customer information that needs to be protected. But with more data moving to cloud environments and employees opting for hybrid settings, the risk of data sprawl and unstructured data has increased substantially. Without an effective data governance strategy, businesses are effectively flying blind, with limited insight into where their data lives at any given time.

The less visibility and awareness IT has over data, the greater the chance that it will be exposed. Particularly for businesses that operate in highly regulated industries, modernization initiatives must include a robust data governance strategy, capable of keeping pace with regulatory changes, while ensuring sensitive data is properly stored and cared for.

How agile are your operations?

Businesses today are faced with frequent disruption, shifts in consumer demand, and evolving regulatory guidelines. With highly integrative, agile content management software, they can take on modernization while keeping pace with the realities of a changing business landscape. Leveraging solutions like Rocket Software’s Mobius 12, businesses can opt for a hybrid approach to modernization. With Rocket’s solution, IT teams can streamline processes and move data to the cloud on their own terms, migrating at a pace that works for them.

Rocket solutions are uniquely equipped to support your business’ data modernization journey. Learn more about how Rocket Software and Mobius 12 can boost any hybrid cloud migration.  

Data and Information Security

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Two decades of technology-driven transformation has left many financial services firms with significant complexity and technical debt. While banking and finance organizations have aggressively moved workloads and apps to the cloud to meet changing customer needs, some remain hesitant to tackle modernization of core infrastructure and systems, fearing a disruption to the business.

In a rapidly changing environment, IT leaders can no longer put off the critical modernization decisions required to ensure secure and resilient operations, which enables rapid innovation and growth.

“There is no option for banks to ignore the increasing complexity and technical debt,” says Nick Drouet, CTO and Distinguished Engineer, Kyndryl UK and Ireland. “They need to move quickly, and at scale.”

Modernization efforts, if not planned and managed carefully, can conflict with compliance demands. With the added challenge for IT leaders in the highly regulated financial services industry is that data security and business resiliency are unassailable business objectives.

“You know you can’t get things wrong,” says Drouet. “You have to be innovative, but in a secure way. That approach applies to all industries, but it’s a heavier burden in financial services.”

Extending modernization across the business

Modernizing core banking systems, some of which still run on on-premises mainframes, is a complex operation, one that Drouet compares to an archeological expedition.  

“You need to understand which applications are talking to others, what infrastructure is supporting those applications, where data is being stored, and what condition it is in,” he explains.

A migration strategy must demonstrate an understanding of core business processes to assure that the infrastructure will remain resilient and customer interactions won’t be impacted. For many banks, the end state may be a hybrid environment, where certain workloads and applications move to the cloud to increase agility and scale and other systems and data remain under the organization’s control on-premises, for regulatory reasons. In those instances, instead of moving workloads to the cloud, organizations can move cloud-like capabilities into the data center. For example, AWS Outposts runs on customers’ premises or edge locations using the same infrastructure, APIs, and tools as the AWS public cloud.

A modernization effort is often scheduled and carried out in waves. For example, one phase might include migrating VMware environments; another would address SAP applications. Kyndryl and AWS offer migration tools and services to plan and execute these steps at scale. These include a jointly established Cloud Center of Excellence and AWS Migration Hub, Database Migration Service, and Server Migration Service.

Cloud-enabled innovation

The benefits of cloud migration extend well beyond cost optimization and scalability. The cloud gives banking organizations the ability to take core processes to the next level, to build and customize new services and monetize data.

For example, a bank can use artificial intelligence and machine learning algorithms in an AWS data lake to study the way customers use a mobile banking app, why they visit branch offices, and when they make deposits. They can use those insights to create a highly personalized, multi-channel customer experience that increases both business volume and customer satisfaction. 

IT leaders at financial services companies recognize that cloud-driven modernization and innovation require an ecosystem of strategic partners and service providers, who bring a variety of skills and expertise. Since becoming an independent customer in 2021, Kyndryl has expanded its extensive knowledge of the needs of financial services organizations across on-premises and cloud environments. As a premier tier partner with over 8,000 AWS certifications, Kyndryl’s expertise with AWS solutions places Kyndryl as a leader in managing mission-critical, complex systems on AWS.

For its part, AWS has tuned its services to provide the security and resiliency that financial firms require, under the leadership of 500 AWS Professional Services (ProServe) financial industry experts.

Cloud-driven transformation can be daunting in highly regulated industries such as financial services. Working with Kyndryl and AWS can help IT teams execute a seamless migration without disrupting the business or its customers, while delivering the agility and scale to ensure innovation and growth.

Learn more about how Kyndryl and AWS are innovating to achieve transformational business outcomes for customers.

Cloud Computing

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As companies lean into data-first modernization to deliver best-in-class experiences and drive innovation, protecting and managing data at scale become core challenges. Given the diversity of data and range of data-inspired use cases, it’s important to align with a robust partner ecosystem. This can help IT teams map the right set of services to unique workflows and to ensure that data is securely managed and accessible regardless of location.

Data volume has become a challenge for organizations as the size and velocity of data increase. Yet there’s no singular, one-size-fits-all framework for secure data storage and management. According to IDC, global data creation and replication will experience a compound annual growth rate (CAGR) of 23% by 2025. This means that organizations need access to a range of solutions for storing sensitive data at scale, especially considering mounting regulations that vary by geography and industry. Two well-known examples: GDPR in Europe and HIPAA privacy rules for health information in the U.S.

With data well situated as the lifeblood of organizations and as a core competitive differentiator, data security becomes paramount. The rise in ransomware attacks and other cybersecurity breaches has raised awareness of the issue and made securing the IT estate a top C-suite priority. 

Upgrading IT and data security to reduce corporate risk was the No. 1 CEO priority for respondents to the IDG/Foundry “State of the CIO Study 2022” research, cited by a third of the respondents. Almost half (49%) called out increasing cybersecurity protections as the top business initiative driving IT investments this year, up from 34% in 2021. 

The push for elevated cybersecurity protections is also filtering down into storage and data management requirements. Gartner research shows that 60% of all enterprises will require storage products to have integrated ransomware defense and mitigation mechanisms by 2025, up from 10% in 2022.

As enterprises modernize with cloud, connectivity, and data, they are gravitating to technology-as-a-service models to refashion IT estates. Traditionally these IT ecosystems feature silos spread across multiple environments, including on-premises data centers and colocation facilities at the edge or across diverse cloud platforms. Compounding the complexity: the problem of multigenerational IT and the challenge of establishing resilience and cybersecurity across workloads. This considering the disparity of the environment and due to mounting cybersecurity, regulatory, and privacy challenges. 

Without an overall strategy for modernization, companies risk mismanaging their edge-to-cloud data efforts, either overprovisioning, which incurs unnecessary costs, or underprovisioning, which impedes their ability to fully deliver for customers or hit key business goals. They may also lack on-location staff expertise to design and manage robust cybersecurity protocols. 

“Customers want to be provided with integrated and optimized hardware and software platforms … to make sure there’s no disruption at all in the business,” says Valerie Da Fonseca, worldwide GreenLake and GTM senior director at HPE. “The key here is to shape the right data strategy, so you simplify data management and provide access controls in an as-a-service model.”

Partner Ecosystem at Work

A rich partner ecosystem is essential for delivering next-generation secure data management protection from edge to cloud. HPE GreenLake’s backup-and-recovery services help companies fulfill data protection service-level agreements (SLAs) without having to make upfront capital investments or take on overprovisioning risk. On-demand cloud backup and recovery services ensure resilience at scale and allow for an agile response to changing business needs. Preconfigured on-premises solutions provide extended options, and a rich ecosystem of third-party partners gives customers choice.

The HPE GreenLake data protection portfolio delivers next-generation data protection services, from design and implementation to delivery with no vendor lock-in. The life cycle starts with HPE’s Zerto ransomware protection and disaster recovery services and extends to hybrid cloud data protection with the HPE Backup and Recovery Service. Finally, HPE offers on-premises data protection with HPE StoreOnce, a modernized data management solution for hybrid cloud that simplifies operations and delivers data protection based on common SLAs. Additional backup-and-recovery options from ISV partners such as Veeam, Commvault, and Cohesity complete the picture, ensuring that HPE GreenLake for Data Protection Services provides a breadth of choice to make data backup-and-recovery operations seamless and automated.

“The partner ecosystem delivers a comprehensive, end-to-end suite of services that adds value to HPE’s data protection strategy,” Da Fonseca says. “We are integrating everything into our hardware and HPE GreenLake as-a-service platform, and the solutions can be located everywhere and anywhere and be fully managed if customers don’t have the staff.”

To ensure the right data management/protection mix, HPE works with customers to understand their business needs and IT management challenges, creating a holistic strategy that encompasses the right partners and operating model. That level of comprehensive planning is crucial to safeguarding data and ensuring an end-to-end data management strategy that truly mitigates risk and meets the needs of the business. At the same time, making data protection available as a service streamlines the customer experience, providing time-to-market and cost advantages.

For more information, visit https://www.hpe.com/us/en/solutions/edge-to-cloud.html

Data Management

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At a time when businesses are pushing the limits of digital transformation and modernization, security, particularly in the mainframe, is critical. But while most firms know this, research has shown that widespread understanding has not manifested much in the way of action. And when asked to rank their most important mainframe security features, respondents said vulnerability scanning was the least important.

But the importance of mainframe security is something that cannot be overstated. Mainframes are responsible for storing businesses’ most sensitive data and information – from financial records to trade secrets to customers’ personal information. Ensuring that data is tightly locked down is already a critical focus, but as more companies prioritize modernization, new threats and security vulnerabilities have started to emerge.

Modernizing the mainframe

While mainframe security is often overlooked, it is vital to the modernization efforts of every business. With so much sensitive data in the mix, these organizations need to maintain a high level of visibility and control over how and when that data is stored and utilized during every modernization initiative. For businesses that rely on mainframe technology, it is important to ensure they are using security architecture that is both flexible and robust enough to keep up with the pace of innovation and surges in demand well into the future. 

The sheer volume of data that businesses deal with daily means mainframes are consistently handling a very high workload. With added strain can often come more complicated processes that bring greater costs to keep everything locked down and secure. And for many companies that operate in highly regulated industries, they need to ensure all of that data is stored and maintained in accordance with relevant compliance standards. And with digital transformation projects well underway in nearly every enterprise, modernizing mainframe systems will enable them to better adapt to new security risks and data management needs.

Mainframe security supports a hybrid approach

When we think about mainframe security, it is not as simple as keeping everything under lock and key in an on-premise system. Digital transformation projects today are largely focused on getting the most out of a company’s data and migrating it to a cloud environment. With that reality in mind, this means that mainframe security needs to be able to extend beyond the on-premise setup and into a sprawling set of new cloud environments.

As data makes its way into a multitude of environments, leaving behind the safety of its on-premise home, data management, and governance operations have become essential steps in the modernization process. The same security infrastructure that keeps data safe in the mainframe needs to be able to extend into those new environments. To better support a hybrid cloud approach to modernizing, businesses can adopt a variety of monitoring tools, improved data storage, and intelligent automation solutions that help IT teams keep track of their data, lighten workloads, and stay on top of regulatory guidelines.

Modernizing mainframe systems and data governance processes help break down siloes across the entire business. A step that is critically important when dealing with multiple environments. When data makes its way out of the mainframe, without complete visibility, data may end up exposed to data breaches, which could prove devastating for the company and its customers alike.

Security lays the foundation to modernize

Ignoring or deprioritizing mainframe security can jeopardize an organization’s entire digital transformation journey. As more businesses turn to cloud-based solutions to achieve those transformation goals, mainframe systems will need to be ready to protect data in an on-premise environment and beyond.

With the acquisition of KRI Security, Rocket Software is strengthening its security capabilities, enabling customers to standardize on their preferred mainframe security solutions. With KRI Security’s added expertise, Rocket Software is bringing world-class security architectures directly to the mainframe modernization process and empowering IT leaders to better protect their data in any environment.

To learn more, visit us here.

Data and Information Security

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The negative impact of legacy networks can be substantial: increased operational costs, restricted potential for digital transformation and difficulty responding to the demands of the business. NTT’s research finds that two in three organizations confirm their technical debt has accumulated, with 71% saying that low network maturity levels are negatively impacting their operational delivery and ability to meet business goals.

Legacy networks are under unprecedented pressure. Upgrades and patches often run behind schedule. Points of vulnerability are multiplying. The shift to hybrid working requires more openings in firewalls, which in turn places a premium on frequent upgrades to firewall protections. Managers face a crisis of visibility, which is destined to get worse as more devices connect to enterprise networks. Research findings show that 93% of organization see the convergence of security and networking as a key focus of how future network characteristics will be changing.

Amit Dhingra, Executive Vice President of Enterprise Networks at NTT, identifies a raft of available protections, including the combination of identity-based security policies and zero trust network access (ZTNA).

Dhingra points out that ZTNA means remote users no longer have to tolerate reduced performance while VPNs “throttle everything down in order to inspect all the packets to ensure the right security protocols are in place. You can actually achieve the same benefit with ZTNA features that are readily available.”

In addition, Dhingra points to NTT’s anomaly detection services across multiple domains, and automated vulnerability assessments, both driven by AIOps. “In the past, this has been a very manual process,” he says. “Now, it happens instantaneously.”

The good news is that decision-makers are universally aware of the security risks that proliferate in the absence of these solutions. NTT’s research found that 90% of organizations say they need AIOps, automation & improved analytics to further optimize their network operations.  Overall, respondents identified inconsistent security policies and increased security risk as the leading consequences of underinvestment in the network.

The threats involved are familiar: 93% of organizations have no doubt that new vulnerabilities will drive increased security demands and 91% plan to move to an identity-based security architecture. Moreover, when NTT’s researchers asked what is driving network modernization, the number one answer was the ability to implement a cybersecurity mesh – the distributed architecture that enables a zero trust approach to network security.

One of the intriguing aspects of the research is the way it examines the network strategies of organizations that generate above-average financial returns. (NTT’s survey defines top-performing companies as those whose year-on-year operating margins were more than 15% and revenue growth was 10% or more in the last financial year).

Top performers are more likely to invest in cybersecurity (87% do so, compared with 41% of organizations not in the top-performing ranks). Notably, they are also more likely to involve their cybersecurity teams in network-vendor selection decisions. More broadly, top-performing organizations score highly in terms of the sophistication of their network strategy. For example, 79% told researchers their security strategy is fully aligned with business strategy. Only 48% of organizations performing at a lower level of commercial success said that this was the case.

Organizations that decide to upgrade their security posture face a wide array of choices and a need for new skills. Respondents to NTT’s survey identify a series of challenges arising from managing multiple vendors, ranging from SLA complexity to lack of interoperability and the difficulty of finding employees with the skills required to manage vendors.

As a result, nine out of 10 respondents agreed strongly that their organizations prefer paying for outcomes and buying from a catalog, with the ability to scale resources as necessary. This suggests a shift away from traditional in-house network management toward network-as-a-service offerings provided by specialist managed service providers (MSPs).

“Actually, this was a part of the report that surprised us,” says Dhingra. “We didn’t expect to hear that so many enterprises are looking to partner with managed service providers. But we do know that access to technologies and skills has become very challenging everywhere, in every part of the world. The answer for many enterprises will be to partner with MSPs who can provide those skills, and that access.”

Download the 2022–23 Global Network Report from NTT now. 

Networking

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By Milan Shetti, CEO Rocket Software

In today’s digital world, technology can make or break a company’s outcomes for its customers. As a result, all companies that use technology to meet or solve customer needs should consider themselves a tech company. In order to meet ever-changing customer demands, it’s critical that companies understand why and how to successfully modernize their tech stacks in order to provide a top-notch customer experience.

Too often, businesses make the mistake of blindly following tech trends and jumping from one platform to another without sufficient planning, disrupting operations and struggling to deliver outcomes and revenue. Instead, companies should look to modernize existing infrastructure — including mainframes. While these undertakings are complex, leaders can ensure a seamless experience by keeping in mind a few key points. 

1. Mainframes are still the backbone of many organizations

Mainframes have been the backbone of IT infrastructure for mission-critical companies for decades because of their resilience, security, and data governance. A report from Rocket Software, The State of the Mainframe, showed that these technologies are still the cornerstone of most large enterprises, with 80% of IT professionals agreeing that the mainframe is still critical to business operations. As cloud-based solutions continue to gain popularity, companies that can achieve selective and in-place modernization that combines both cloud and mainframe technology will be ahead of the curve.

2. Modernizing in place ensures a seamless experience

As new innovative technologies enter the market, many organizations are looking to “rip and replace” mainframe systems for cloud technologies. But while the impulse is strong, rip and replace approaches to modernization introduce significant risk, requiring a substantial time, cost, and energy investment with no guarantee of a successful outcome. Organizations must remember that ripping and replacing requires organizations to replace all of their IT infrastructure while maintaining the same level of security, data governance, and resiliency as the mainframe — a nearly impossible task.

Fortunately, with the right tools and technology, any innovative application can be developed in the cloud and then safely and securely connected to the mainframe with little adoption. These hybrid infrastructure models allow businesses to continue leveraging the reliability and security of their mainframe infrastructure while also taking advantage of the latest tools to provide teams with the flexibility and user experience they crave.

3. Hybrid cloud is the future

With 10 of the top-10 companies in the defense, space, banking, and healthcare industries continuing to leverage mainframe technology through hybrid cloud models, it’s clear that hybrid infrastructures are the future. By enabling core infrastructure to continue living in mainframe environments while leveraging APIs that provide teams and customers with access to cloud solutions and web and mobile applications, businesses are providing a modern experience for employees and end-users without taking on additional risk. 

4. Customers are at the core of modernization 

Companies that take the time to understand what their customers really want from their business can take a more strategic approach to modernization. By identifying customer needs and then working backward, teams can more clearly determine where modernization is necessary in order to deliver the desired outcomes. By making customers the central point of modernization efforts, companies not only mitigate disruptions and save time and resources, but also ensure efforts are aligned with what their customers truly want.

As we dive deeper into an age of modernization, Rocket is looking forward to the challenges ahead as we continue our mission to simplify mainframe modernization. To learn how Rocket Software can simplify your mainframe modernization project, visit our modernization page.

Digital Transformation

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By Milan Shetti, CEO Rocket Software

In today’s digital world, technology can make or break a company’s outcomes for its customers. As a result, all companies that use technology to meet or solve customer needs should consider themselves a tech company. In order to meet ever-changing customer demands, it’s critical that companies understand why and how to successfully modernize their tech stacks in order to provide a top-notch customer experience.

Too often, businesses make the mistake of blindly following tech trends and jumping from one platform to another without sufficient planning, disrupting operations and struggling to deliver outcomes and revenue. Instead, companies should look to modernize existing infrastructure — including mainframes. While these undertakings are complex, leaders can ensure a seamless experience by keeping in mind a few key points. 

1. Mainframes are still the backbone of many organizations

Mainframes have been the backbone of IT infrastructure for mission-critical companies for decades because of their resilience, security, and data governance. A report from Rocket Software, The State of the Mainframe, showed that these technologies are still the cornerstone of most large enterprises, with 80% of IT professionals agreeing that the mainframe is still critical to business operations. As cloud-based solutions continue to gain popularity, companies that can achieve selective and in-place modernization that combines both cloud and mainframe technology will be ahead of the curve.

2. Modernizing in place ensures a seamless experience

As new innovative technologies enter the market, many organizations are looking to “rip and replace” mainframe systems for cloud technologies. But while the impulse is strong, rip and replace approaches to modernization introduce significant risk, requiring a substantial time, cost, and energy investment with no guarantee of a successful outcome. Organizations must remember that ripping and replacing requires organizations to replace all of their IT infrastructure while maintaining the same level of security, data governance, and resiliency as the mainframe — a nearly impossible task.

Fortunately, with the right tools and technology, any innovative application can be developed in the cloud and then safely and securely connected to the mainframe with little adoption. These hybrid infrastructure models allow businesses to continue leveraging the reliability and security of their mainframe infrastructure while also taking advantage of the latest tools to provide teams with the flexibility and user experience they crave.

3. Hybrid cloud is the future

With 10 of the top-10 companies in the defense, space, banking, and healthcare industries continuing to leverage mainframe technology through hybrid cloud models, it’s clear that hybrid infrastructures are the future. By enabling core infrastructure to continue living in mainframe environments while leveraging APIs that provide teams and customers with access to cloud solutions and web and mobile applications, businesses are providing a modern experience for employees and end-users without taking on additional risk. 

4. Customers are at the core of modernization 

Companies that take the time to understand what their customers really want from their business can take a more strategic approach to modernization. By identifying customer needs and then working backward, teams can more clearly determine where modernization is necessary in order to deliver the desired outcomes. By making customers the central point of modernization efforts, companies not only mitigate disruptions and save time and resources, but also ensure efforts are aligned with what their customers truly want.

As we dive deeper into an age of modernization, Rocket is looking forward to the challenges ahead as we continue our mission to simplify mainframe modernization. To learn how Rocket Software can simplify your mainframe modernization project, visit our modernization page.

Digital Transformation

Posted on Posted in Digital transformation, General topics Tagged with , , , , , , , ,

By Milan Shetti, CEO Rocket Software

Modernization has become a hot-button topic across the tech and business landscape. With ongoing advancements in cloud technology and the seemingly unlimited potential of Artificial Intelligence (AI) and Machine Learning (ML) technologies, many organizations are eager to digitally transform and modernize their operations and software applications. In fact, 80% of IT decision-makers say their companies plan to have modernized more than half of their custom applications before the end of 2022.

With a significant push toward infrastructure modernization, many organizations have hired Chief Modernization Officers (CMOs) to help navigate the complexities of this undertaking. But many still question the need for a CMO when they already have a Chief Technology Officer (CTO) in house. While most C-suite level positions are clearly defined, the CMO and CTO’s roles and responsibilities are uniquely intertwined and often confused as being the same — but this is not the case. For companies looking to modernize their infrastructure, it is important to recognize the differences between a CTO and CMO and understand what each position brings to the table and why both are essential to achieve true modernization.

Defining the roles of CTOs and CMOs Starts with defining modernization 

The CTO and CMO positions are often confused because the word modernization has different meanings for different people. To many business leaders, modernization is about driving evolution and the creation of new business models by implementing innovative technologies and methodologies to improve operations. This, however, is a better definition for the process of digital transformation and is chiefly what CTOs work to achieve. 

The CTO’s role is to stay at the forefront of emerging technologies and practices and understand how processes can be changed and improved through their implementation. A CTO is focused on creating great experiences and offerings for customers, clients, and partners of an organization, taking a pragmatic approach to improve business outcomes, often leading with a “rip and replace” mentality for underutilized or underperforming technology.

Modernization, on the other hand, is a more internal and holistic process that focuses on understanding and preparing a company’s infrastructure, technology, and products to succeed in a fast-changing, digital world without upending a company’s current operating model. A successful modernization operation is a continuum and CMOs have the expertise and attention to detail to constantly analyze operations, uncover opportunities to optimize, and ensure modernization projects align with business and customer goals. CMOs consider the company’s business operations as a whole, not only evaluating the time and resources needed to achieve a particular modernization project but also how it will affect operations along all departments and whether it is worth the effort. 

Balancing the two to create true modernization

Often, large-scale transformation projects are unsuccessful because organizations fail to recognize that true modernization requires continuous transformation and a wholly pragmatic approach to modernizing tools and processes. While CTOs bring exciting and innovative techniques and tools to the table, CMOs bring the rationality and necessity required for projects to succeed.

In the end, businesses that are successful in their modernization ventures understand that it is not a matter of one or the other when it comes to CMOs and CTOs — but, rather, a balancing of the two. By fusing the creativity and forward-thinking mindset of a CTO together with the pragmatic, strategic approaches of a CMO, companies can stay on the cutting edge of innovation while bringing true modernization to their operations.

To learn how Rocket Software’s suite of technologies can help simplify and streamline your organization’s modernization efforts, visit the Rocket Software modernization page.

Digital Transformation

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Modernization journeys are complex and typically highly custom, dependent on an enterprise’s core business challenges and overall competitive goals. Yet one way to simplify transformation and accelerate the process is using an industry-specific approach. Any vertical modernization approach should balance in-depth, vertical sector expertise with a solutions-based methodology that caters to specific business needs.

As part of their partnership, IBM and Amazon Web Services (AWS) are pursuing a variety of industry-specific blueprints and solutions designed to help customers modernize apps for a hybrid IT environment, which includes AWS Cloud.

The solutions, some in pilot stage and others in early development, transcend a variety of core industries, including manufacturing, financial services, healthcare, and transportation.

These industry solutions bring to bear both IBM and AWS’ deep-seated expertise in the specific security, interoperability, and data governance requirements impacting vertical sectors. Such an approach ensures that app modernization efforts meet any relevant certification requirements and solve business-specific problems.

“A general modernization path brings the technical assets together whereas an industry-focused initiative is more of a problem-solving, solutions-oriented design,” says Praveena Varadarajan, modernization offering leader and strategist for IBM’s Hybrid Cloud Migration Group.

With the right industry solution and implementation partner in place, organizations can steer towards effective modernization. Along with the proper technologies and tools, the right consulting partners can help accelerate transformation, specifically if they can together demonstrate deep and diverse expertise, modernization patterns, and industry-specific blueprints.

Consider the critical area of security controls, for example. Companies across industries have core requirements related to data security and governance controls, yet different industries have uniquely focused considerations.

In healthcare, securing personal health data is key, governed by national standards laid out by the Health Insurance Portability and Accountability Act (HIPAA).The financial services industry must adhere to a different set of security requirements, from protecting Personal Identifiable Information (PII) to safeguards that meet Payment Card Industry (PCI) compliance, meant to protect credit card holder’s information.

“Industry verticals have different compliance and regulatory issues that have to be taken into consideration when doing any type of refactoring or app modernization,” notes Hilton Howard, global migration and modernization lead at AWS. “Healthcare and life sciences companies have different governance and compliance concerns along with issues on how data is managed compared to technology companies or those in energy and financial services.”

AWS/IBM’s Industry Edge

IBM and AWS have put several mechanisms and programs in place to codify their rich vertical industry expertise and make it easily accessible to customers in critical sectors. IBM and AWS experts collaborate to identify potential joint offerings and solution blueprints designed to provide a modernization roadmap that is a level up from a general technical guide. Much of the guidance and deliverables is codified from joint initiatives conducted with large customers to provide an accelerated problem-solving path to a wider audience. The deliverables could be reference architectures or an industry-specific proof of concept—the goal is to offer institutional knowledge and near-turn-key solutions meant to streamline modernization and accelerate time-to-value.

“Sometimes it’s best practices or a solution design or some combination,” Varadarajan says. “It’s about bringing internal or external tools to bear to solve specific business issues.”

In addition, AWS and IBM are working on complex transformation aimed at large-scale transformation and modernization efforts. This will help enterprise customers adopt new digital operating models structurally and prescriptively, and transform with AWS to deliver strategic business outcomes. The program builds a meaningful partnership between AWS, IBM, and the client, and delivers an integrated program underpinned by a tailored playbook that delivers the clients’ prioritized initiatives enabled by AWS, while developing sustainable organizational capabilities for continuous transformation.

“Applying an industry lens keeps solutions grounded to the guiding principles of the business,” Varadarajan says. “The goal of transformation is not just to become more modern, but to change the way companies adapt to the new norms of running a business in the digital world.”

United’s Revenue Management Modernization Takes Flight

United Airlines took to the cloud to modernize its Revenue Management system to reduce costs, but also to land on a platform that didn’t limit its ability to apply modern revenue management processes. The airline also sought to provide analysts with finer data access controls so they could be more analytical and creative when driving revenue management decisions.

Working with AWS and IBM, United created and scaled a data warehouse using Amazon Redshift, an off-the-shelf service that manages terabytes of data with ease. Critical success factors included embracing DevOps practices, emphasis on disaster recovery, and system stability, and continuous review of design and migration decisions. Next stop: Migrating a complex forecasting module planned for later in 2022.

To learn more visit https://www.ibm.com/consulting/aws

Application Management