Rising Cloud Spending May Not Mean the End of Traditional Infrastructure

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As cloud investments continue to increase, it's fair to wonder if traditional infrastructure has reached its lifespan.

There has been a massive exodus of mainframe talent from the workforce due to aging IT professionals, coupled with new generations of entry-level talent being raised in an application-based, data-driven culture. the cloud. It's time to put old technology to pasture and commit to a cloud future, isn't it?

For some of us, this is an all-too-common refrain. In the 1980s, Sun Microsystems was going to be the death of the mainframe. PCs and client/server computing would also be the end of the mainframe, if not in the 90s, at least in the early 2000s.

But still, here we are. With cloud investment growing year-over-year for a decade, and investment in data center systems continuing to grow in 2023 by an expected rate of 4.7%, according to Gartner, the mainframe endures.

The continued growth of cloud services reflects the desire of companies to better control their data. Adding cloud resources to complement existing systems (rather than completely replacing them) combines the cloud with traditional infrastructure for a more hybrid approach.

Data management challenges ensure the mainframe won't die

The biggest challenge facing large enterprises is how to get the most out of their data, as it is increasingly dispersed across multiple systems, as well as in a hybrid cloud environment. Ensuring data is accessible and secure across multiple environments (legacy, on-premises, and data center applications running in the cloud) is a growing headache.

For these companies, large on-premises systems remain the glue that holds mission-critical applications and processes together. But the cloud has enormous value. Organizations are leveraging cloud technologies for analytics and other functions, and it's essential that they are able to integrate them. Doing so securely, transparently, and with ease, while remaining compliant, can be a daunting task.

In a survey of respondents using mainframe technology, 80% of IT professionals said that mainframe technology remains critical to business operations. Businesses have multiple layers of technology that have accumulated over time, into a complex web of applications and processes that support their business.

Companies need to marry the innovations and tools of today's world with legacy technology. Extracting and replacing existing technology disrupts businesses, draining both employees and scarce financial resources.

As enterprises grapple with this new reality, venture-backed startups and small businesses may feel that this hybrid approach to infrastructure has no impact on them.

They would be wrong.

Opportunities of hybrid environments

Enterprise-backed startups will probably never have an IBM mainframe. This may happen in a later growth phase as the business expands, but this hybrid approach presents an opportunity.

Any startup writing an enterprise solution that runs in the cloud needs to anticipate the value of that application to their biggest customers. So even if an organization isn't using traditional infrastructure, it needs to be able to speak the language of the business. These include addressing legacy challenges, modernization, and cost challenges associated with building a hybrid cloud environment where cloud and legacy infrastructure live in harmony.

Instead, these cloud-native companies can learn from the “adopt and extend” playbook, finding ways to accommodate critical on-premises data and system integrations into their ecosystems. These hybrid environments...