Considering the Role of Mainframes in the Future of Digital Infrastructure

This IDC study describes selected insights based on the analysis of IDC's recent Future of Digital Infrastructure 2022 Global Sentiment Survey. It looks specifically at feedback from 180 organizations that identify mainframe systems as being a very important element of their digital infrastructure when it comes to achieving business goals over the next two years. These organizations prioritize digital business agility and data-driven insights and deep levels of customer engagement. They committed to proactively investing to ensure that mainframes remain critical pillars in their overall distributed, hybrid, and multicloud infrastructure environments. For organizations that are refining or developing their future mainframe strategies, this study provides recommendations on critical issues to consider and investments to prioritize. The study also highlights examples of ongoing industry innovation focused on enabling continuous mainframe modernization programs."Technology buyers with strategic commitments to mainframes should focus on making workload deployment choices based on business requirements, including performance, security, and sustainability. They should also look for appropriate opportunities to increase mainframe utilization and to take advantage of system upgrades and new mainframe versions that are optimized for more efficient support of data-intensive workloads," says Mary Johnston Turner, research vice president IDC Future of Digital Infrastructure Agenda research. "Regardless of the journey an organization decides to take, they should know that the mainframe industry ecosystem, including hardware vendors, infrastructure software providers, DevOps software suppliers and providers of automation, AIOps, and open source software, is actively working to improve mainframe performance, security, integrations, and manageability to ensure the long-term value of the platform."