CXOs consider mainframe and legacy modernization a business priority
More than 70% of CXOs of global companies consider mainframe or legacy modernization a strategic business priority for the next three years, a Tata Consultancy Services survey reveals.
The study surveyed 211 CXOs and senior decision makers from companies that currently have legacy or mainframe applications.
It highlights noteworthy trends on how companies view the future of legacy and mainframe applications in their digital transformation, bottlenecks and challenges in migrating those applications, and the preference for microservices based technologies.
Key findings
- Over two-third of the respondents are using mainframe or legacy applications for core business operations and over 60% for customer-facing functions.
- Top three challenges with legacy systems were integration with new applications (61%), lack of business agility (57%), and security exposure (55%).
- The main barriers to migrating legacy systems to the cloud were concerns around security (44%), disruption to operations (37%), and reliability (33%).
- Greater agility to respond to market needs (45%) is a key business objective in driving legacy modernizations, followed by improving application performance / responsiveness (41%), and improving availability / disaster recovery and improving compliance / security (38% each).
- Re-engineering / redevelopment (33%) is the most preferred approach for legacy modernization, followed by lift and shift (20%), retain and optimize (19%) and refactor (9%).
- Most of the companies that participated in the survey are currently (64%) or planning to (22%) use tools to partially or fully automate modernization.
“The survey reinforces our own experiences with customers across industries and markets. They are giving the highest priority to legacy and mainframe modernization in their digital transformation programs, especially during the pandemic.
“Enterprises are looking for partners who can help mitigate the risks of disruption and deliver high quality outcomes with speed to market,” said Vijayalakshmi Gopal, Business Head, TCS MasterCraft.