Amazon Web Services (AWS) is determined to help large corporations move from the mainframe to the cloud – but this is no mean feat.
According to a recent report from Computer Weekly, one of the biggest problems with migrating mainframe applications to the cloud is the lack of a skilled workforce to make it happen. Mainframe experts are few and far between, the report states, as the majority have already retired.
But there are still many large enterprises eager to make the switch, mostly in Japan and Australia, and primarily in the banking industry and public sector.
Now, Amazon is developing a new partner competency program that will validate companies capable of assisting with migrating mainframes. For starters, there are four independent software vendors and three consulting firms that were pre-qualified, including Micro Focus, Blu Age, Infosys and Deloitte.
“Our biggest growth business in APAC is taking Cobol code off the mainframe and putting it on cheaper hardware, or on AWS and Azure,” Stephen McNulty, Micro Focus APAC/Japan President, told Computer Weekly.
“We have many financial institution customers in Asia and around the world running mainframe applications on public cloud, so they can run a proper DevOps process all the way through to continual improvement and delivery. Some of them might take development and testing off the mainframe, put it on Azure or AWS, try that for a year and then start moving production workloads to public cloud or to a private cloud datacenter.”
