IT Modernization Goes Beyond The Apps, Kyndryl Says
April 17, 2023 Alex Woodie
When the word “modernization” is said in the midrange and mainframe circles, it usually means application modernization, or transforming your older RPG and COBOL applications to look and feel like they just came off the Java or C# assembly line. But there’s another view of modernization that encompasses more than just the apps, and according to a new report from Kyndryl, there’s quite a bit of work to do.
While Kyndryl is certainly familiar with the application modernization needs of IBM i and System Z shops, the company (formerly IBM Global Technology Services) takes a broader view of the term, says Harish Grama, Kyndryl’s senior vice president and global practice lead for cloud.
“Modernizing applications are certainly a very key part of it,” Grama says, “but they are a part of it. It starts with modernizing their infrastructure.”
In the old days, monolithic applications ran on dedicated servers sitting in a company’s data center, or maybe a data closet. They hired people to manually provision the server, the storage, the network, the applications, and everything else in between. In the modern world, those tasks have been streamlined considerably, Grama says.
“You probably heard the term ‘infrastructure as code,’” he says. “You don’t want people manually setting up machines. You want to have virtual environments, whether you call it a private cloud or public cloud or what have you. And you want to be able to automate the provisioning of the infrastructure, the operating system, the VMs, and the containers running on it. You want to be able to do that as code, so it’s very flexible, it’s easy to change, etcetera. And we don’t have people running around just plugging cables in here, plugging cables in there.”
Modernization means changing how developers do their jobs, too. In a modern DevOps (or DevSecOps for the security-inclined) environment, the development toolchains have been pre-integrated to eliminate time-consuming handoffs, where code changes have a nasty habit of falling through the cracks. It’s about implementing continuous innovation, continuous deployment (CI/CD) pipelines that allow developers to change their applications 10 or 100 times per day, Grama says.
Source: Kyndryl report
“And then finally, once you actually deploy it, you need to be able to manage it,” he says. “You’re tending to security aspects around it, to the compliance aspects around it, and to the cost aspects around it. So that then gets into the whole optimization cycle that says, hey, look your applications need to change in this way. Your infrastructure needs to change in this way.”
That type of modern IT operation, Grama says, should be the ultimate goal of organizations, including the large Fortune 4000 global firms that Kyndryl calls customers. But we’ve got a ways to get there.
For Modernize Your Operations To Transform IT Into A Department Of Doers, Kyndryl commissioned Forrester to survey 361 global decision-makers in charge of modernizing IT operations, to see how far along they are on their modernization journeys. It turns out there are some sizable gaps between where organizations are now and where they want to go.
For instance, nearly half of those surveyed say their operating models prevent them from making quick decisions based on changes to the business. Only 55 percent said they can effectively scale their operations when needed. And nearly half said they struggle to control and predict IT costs in the cloud, a common site (though not an exclusive one) for organizations’ modernization exercises.
In many cases, old infrastructure, including aging IBM i and System Z servers and applications, are holding organizations back, Grama says.
“It’s not surprising to hear the outcome of that study,” he says. “A lot of these guys have really old infrastructure. They have old monolithic application written on legacy technologies that don’t lend themselves to modernization at any level. There’s complexity, there’s sprawl. And especially the kind of customers that we deal with… every one of them has had sprawl built up over the last many decades. And they don’t understand exactly what they have, and in cases they don’t particularly have the most accurate source code. Their applications are not agile, their infrastructures are very static, they don’t use things like infrastructure as code, etcetera.”
Grama’s key takeaways from the study are a confirmation that global firms are suffering from IT inefficiency, a lack of innovation, and a lack of malleability to get new business models. “That’s all baked right in there,” the former tech executive for a large Wall Street bank tells IT Jungle.
There are also modernization aspects to security. Following the disclosure of a new vulnerability, cybercriminals have exploit code ready in 15 minutes. By comparison, most organizations move at a glacial pace when it comes to shoring up their infrastructure.
“That’s a huge one,” Grama says. Security concerns, especially with the surface area for hackers ever-increasing every time we do something new, whether it’s distributed computing, edge computing, wide area network, SVNs, etcetera. That becomes a huge problem.”
Hiring tech workers with the right skills seems to always be difficult. But it’s becoming even more difficult while going through a modernization process. According to the Forrester study, 42 percent of respondents said their organizations don’t have the right skill sets to manage its current operations, 34 percent said their organization requires too many skilled workers, and about one-third said they struggle to retain employees.
Source: Kyndryl report
“Enterprises grow over time, and your workforce keeps changing,” Grama says, “so it’s very hard to find a critical mass in any one of these places that really understand all of what’s running.”
Grama says he wasn’t surprised by any of the findings. His experience, including managing a cloud migration for a major bank, building and running IBM’s cloud, and now running Kyndryl’s cloud operation, gives him a unique perspective. “I’ve been doing this for a while,” he says. “I’ve been on the provider end. I’ve been on the consumer end, and now on the services end of it. So in a sense, I fill all three shoes, if you can think of a concept with three shoes rather than two.”
One of the biggest concerns Grama warned about was complacency. The line of business typically just wants to keep running and growing its business, and doesn’t want IT to get in the way. It can be hard to convince business decision-makers that they should invest in IT modernization when the reports keep showing up every morning, like they’re supposed.
“People who want to modernize it, getting their business leader’s heads around it is very hard,” he says. “Because if you don’t get your financial reports in the morning, that’s a real issue and people will jump on that. But if you tell them, hey, look, if I undertake this pain, if I spend this kind of money, I can do it faster, I can add these bells and whistles. That’s what you get for modernizing, right? So to start to evangelize that up your business line is a much harder thing to do because they’re worried about their day to day reports. And as long as they’re getting it, they don’t want to really do the longer-reaching, more beneficial stuff.”
RELATED STORIES
Why Modernize Applications? The Reasons Might Surprise You
