When applications are mission-critical, where they are hosted matters far less than keeping them operating smoothly.
As many organizations face a ticking time bomb to modernize mainframe applications, one solution is to find a dependable, repeatable way to transition to a public cloud without degrading these vulnerable and essential systems of record.
The next BriefingsDirect cloud adoption discussion explores the long-awaited means to solve the mainframe to cloud transition for essential but aging applications and data. We’re going to learn how Unisys and Microsoft can deliver ClearPath Forward assets to Microsoft Azure cloud without risky code changes.
Listen to the podcast. Find it
on iTunes. Read a full transcript or download a copy.
To learn more about the latest on-ramps to secure and agile public cloud adoption, we welcome Chuck Lefebvre, Senior Director of Product Management for ClearPath Forward at Unisys, and Bob Ellsworth, Worldwide Director of Mainframe Transformation at Microsoft. The discussion is moderated by Dana Gardner, Principal Analyst at Interarbor Solutions.
Here are some excerpts:
Gardner: Bob, what’s driving the demand nowadays for more organizations to run more of their legacy apps in the public cloud?
But the journey just starts there. Customers now want to further empower employees to access the applications they need to be more efficient and effective, to engage with their customers in different ways, and to find ways of using cloud technologies to transform products, such as machine learning (ML), artificial intelligence (AI), and business intelligence (BI).
Gardner: And it’s not enough to just have some services or data in the cloud. It seems there’s a whole greater than the sum of the parts for organizations seeking digital transformation -- to get more of their IT assets into a cloud or digitally agile environment.
Destination of choice: Cloud
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| Ellsworth |
Gardner: And, of course, this has been a cloud adoption journey for well over 10 years. Do you sense that something is different now? Are there more means available to get more assets into a cloud environment? Is this a tipping point?
Ellsworth: It is a tipping point. We’ve seen -- especially around the mainframe, which is what I focus on -- a huge increase in customer interest and selection of the cloud in the last 1.5 years as the preferred destination. And one of the reasons is that Azure has absolutely demonstrated its capability to run these mission- and business-critical workloads.
Gardner: Are these cloud transitions emerging differently across the globe? Is there a regional bias of some sort? Is the public sector lagging or leading? How about vertical industries? Where is this cropping up first and foremost?
Ellsworth: We’re seeing it occur in all industries; in particular, financial services. We find there are more mainframes in financial services, banking capital markets, and insurance than in any other industries.
So we see a propensity there where, again, the cloud has become a destination of choice because of its capability to run mission- and business-critical workloads. But in addition, we’re seeing this in state and local governments, and in the US Federal Government. The challenge in the government sector is the long cycle it takes to get funding for these projects. So, it’s not a lack of desire, it’s more the time it takes to move through the funding process.
Gardner: Chuck, I’m still surprised all these years into the cloud journey that there’s still such a significant portion of data and applications that are not in the cloud environment. What’s holding things back? What’s preventing enterprises from taking advantage of cloud benefits?
Lefebvre: A lot of it is inertia. And in some cases, incorrect assumptions about what would be involved in moving. That’s what’s so attractive about our Unisys ClearPath solution. We can help clients move their ClearPath workloads without change. We take that ClearPath software stack from MCP initially and move it and re-platform it on Microsoft Azure.
To the Cloud
I also second what Bob said earlier. We see a lot of interest from our financial partners. We have a large number of banking application partners running on our ClearPath MCP environment, and those partners are ready to go and help their clients as an option to move their workloads into the Azure public cloud.
Pandemic puts focus on agility
Gardner: Has the disruption from the coronavirus and the COVID-19 disease been influencing this transition? Is it speeding it up? Slowing it down? Maybe some other form of impact?
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| Lefebvre |
I think now that that’s settled in, they’ve sorted out their virtual private networks (VPNs) and their always-on access, processes, that perhaps now we’ll see some initiatives evolving. I think, initially, it was just businesses supporting their employees working from home.
My perspective is that that should be enabled equally as well, whether they are running their backend systems of record in a public cloud or on-premises. Either way would work for them.
Gardner: Bob, at Microsoft, are you seeing any impact from the pandemic in terms of how people are adopting cloud services?
Ellsworth: We’re actually seeing an increase in customer interest and adoption of cloud services because of COVID-19. We’re seeing that in particular in some of our solutions such as Teams for doing collaboration and webinars, and connecting with others remotely. We’re seeing a big increase there.
And Office 365, we’ve seen a huge increase in deployments of customers using the Office 365 technology. In addition, Azure; we’ve also seen a big increase in Azure consumption as customers are dealing with the application growth and requirements of running these applications.
As far as new customers that are considering moving to the cloud, I had thought originally, back in March when this was starting to hit, that our conversations would slow down as people dealt with more immediate needs. But, in fact, it was about a two-to-three-week slow down. But now, we’re seeing a dramatic increase in interest in having conversations about what are the right solutions and methods to move the workloads to the cloud.
So, the adoption is accelerating as customers look for ways to reduce cost, increase agility, and find new ways of running the workloads that they have today.
Gardner: Chuck, another area of impact in the market is around skills. There is often either a lack of programmers for some of these older languages or the skills needed to run your own data centers. Is there a skill factor that’s moving the transition to cloud?
We expect most clients – rather than managing it themselves in the cloud – will defer to us, and that will free up their staff to do other things. They will have retirements, but less risk.
Gardner: Bob, another issue that’s been top-of-mind for people is security. One of the things we found is that security can be a tough problem when you are transitioning, when you change a development environment, go from development to production, or move from on-premises to cloud.
How are we helping people remain secure during a cloud transition, and also perhaps benefit from a better security posture once they make the transition?
Time to transition safely, securely
Ellsworth: We always recommend making security part of the planning process. When you’re thinking of transforming from a datacenter solution to the cloud, part of that planning is for the security elements. We always look to collaborate with our partners, such as Unisys, to help define that security infrastructure and deployment.
What’s great about the Azure solutions is we’ve focused on hybrid as the way of deploying customers’ workloads. Most customers aren’t ready to move everything to the cloud all at the same time. For that reason, and with the fact that we focus on hybrid, we allow a customer to deploy portions of the workload to the cloud and the other portions in their data center. Then, over time, they can transition to the cloud.
But during that process supporting your high levels of security for user access, identity management, or even controls of access to the right applications and data -- that’s all done through the planning and using technologies such as Microsoft Active Directory and synchronization with Azure Active Directory. So with that planning it’s so important to ensure successful deployments and ensure the high levels of security that customers require.
Gardner: Chuck, anything to offer on the security?
Gardner: We’ve described what’s driving organizations to the cloud, the fact that it’s accelerating, that there’s a tipping point in what adoption can be accomplished safely and reliably. We’ve also talked about what’s held people back and their challenges.
Let’s now look at what’s different about the latest solutions for the cloud transition journey. For Unisys, Chuck, how are your customers reconciling the mainframe past with the cloud future?
No change in digital footprint
Lefebvre: We are able to transition ClearPath applications with no change. It’s been roughly 10 years since we’ve been deploying these systems on Intel platforms, and in the case of MCP hosting it on a Microsoft Windows Server kernel. That’s been in place under our Unisys Libra brand for more than 10 years now.
In the last couple of years, we’ve also been allowing clients to deploy that software stack on virtualized servers of their choice: on Microsoft Hyper-V and the VMware virtualization platforms. So it’s a natural transition for us to move that and offer that in Azure cloud. We can do that because of the layered approach in our technology. It’s allowed us to present an approach to our clients that is very risk-free, very straightforward.
To the Cloud
The cloud adoption transition is really a very low-risk, safe, and efficient journey to the public cloud for those existing solutions that our clients have on ClearPath.
Gardner: And you described this as an ongoing logical, cascading transition -- standing on the shoulders of your accomplishments -- and then continuing forward. How was that different from earlier migrations, or a lift-and-shift, approach? Why is today’s transition significantly different from past migrations?
Lefebvre: Well, a migration often involves third-parties doing a recompilation, a refactoring of the application, so taking the COBOL code, recompiling it, refactoring it into Java, and then breaking it up, and moving the data out of our data formats and into a different data structure. All of those steps have risk and disruption associated with them. I’m sure there are third-parties that have proven that. That can work. It just takes a long time and introduces risk.
Gardner: Bob, does that jibe with what you are seeing? Is the transition approach as Bob described it an advantage over a migration process as he described?
Ellsworth: Yes, Chuck described it very well. We see the very same thing. What I have found, -- and I’ve been working with Unisys clients since I joined Microsoft in 2001, early on going to the Unisys UNITE conference -- was that Unisys clients are very committed and dedicated to their platform. They like the solutions they are using. They are used to using those developer tools. They have built up the business-critical, mission-critical applications and workloads.
For those customers that continue to be committed to the platform, absolutely, this kind of what I call “re-platforming” could easily be called a “transition.” You are taking what you currently have and simply moving it onto the cloud. It is absolutely the lowest risk, the least cost, and the quickest time-to-deployment approach.
Gardner: Chuck, the process around cloud adoption has been going on for a while. For those of us advocating for cloud 10 or 12 years ago, we were hoping that it would get to the point where it would be a smooth transition. Tell me about the history and the benefits of how ClearPath Forward and Azure had come together specifically? How long have Microsoft and Unisys been at this? Why is now, as we mentioned earlier, a tipping point?
Lefebvre: We’ve been working on this for a little over a year. We did some initial work with two of our financial application partners and North America banking partners and the initial testing was very positive. Then as we were finishing our engineering work to do the validation, our internal Unisys IT organization, which operates about 25 production applications to run the business, went ahead in parallel with us and deployed half of those on MCP in Azure, using the very process that I described earlier.
Today, they are running 25 production applications. About half of them have been there for nine months and the other half for the last two months. They are supporting things like invoicing our customers, tracking our supply chain status, and so, a number of critical applications.
We have taken that journey not just from an engineering point of view, but we’ve proven it to ourselves. We drank our own champagne, so to speak, and that’s given us a lot of confidence. It’s the right way to go, and we expect our clients will see those benefits as well.
Gardner: We haven’t talked about the economics too much. Are you finding, now that you’ve been doing this for a while, that there is a compelling economic story? A lot of people are fearful that a transition or migration would be very costly, that they won’t necessarily save anything by doing this, and so maybe are resistant. But what’s the dollars’ and cents’ impact that you have been seeing now that you’ve been doing this while transitioning ClearPath to Azure?
Rapid returns
Lefebvre: Yes, there are tangible financial benefits that our IT organization has measured. In these small isolated applications, they calculated about a half-a-million dollars in savings across three years in their return on investment (ROI) analysis. And that return was nearly immediate because the transition for them was mostly about planning the outage period to ensure a non-stop operation and make sure we always supported the business. There wasn’t actually a lot of labor, just more planning time. So that return was almost immediate.
Gardner: Bob, anything to offer on the economics of making a smooth transition to cloud?
Ellsworth: Yes, absolutely. I have found a couple of catalysts for customers as far as cost savings. If a customer is faced with a potential hardware upgrade -- perhaps the server they are running on is near end-of-life -- by moving the workload to the cloud and only paying for the consumption of what you use, it allows you to avoid the hardware upgrade costs. So you get some nice and rapid benefits in cost avoidance.
So for those test and development systems, you don’t need to have hardware sitting in the corner waiting to be used during peak periods. You can spin up an environment in the cloud, do all of your testing, and then spin it back down. You get some very nice cost savings by not having dedicated hardware for those test and development environments.
Gardner: Let’s dig into the technology. What’s under the hood that’s allowing this seamless cloud transition, Chuck?
Secret sauce
Lefebvre: Underneath the hood is the architecture that we have transformed to over the last 10 years where we are already running our ClearPath systems on Intel-based hardware on a Microsoft Windows Server kernel. That allows that environment to be used and re-platformed in the same manner.
To accomplish that, originally, we had some very clever technology that allows the Unisys compilers generating unique instructions to be emulated on an Intel-based, Windows-based server.
That’s really the fundamental underpinning that first allowed those clients to run on Intel servers instead of on proprietary Unisys-designed chips. Once that’s been completed, we’re able to be much more flexible on where it’s deployed. The rigor to which Microsoft has ensured that Windows is Windows -- no matter if it’s running on a server you buy, whether it’s virtualized on Hyper-V, or virtualized in Azure -- really allows us to achieve that seamless operation of running in any of those three different models and environments.
Gardner: Where do you see the secret sauce, Bob? Is the capability to have Windows be pure, if you will, across the hybrid spectrum of deployment models?
To the Cloud
And then the great thing is with the technologies available, it’s very, very easy to take VMs running in the data center and migrate them to infrastructure as a service (IaaS) VMs running in the cloud. So, seamless transformation and making that migration.
You’re taking everything that’s running in your production system, or test and development systems, and simply deploying them up in the cloud’s VM instead of on-premises. So, a great process. Definitely, the earlier investment that was made allows that capability to be able to utilize the cloud.
Gardner: Do you have early adopters who have gone through this? How do they benefit?
Private- and public-sector success stories
Lefebvre: As I indicated earlier, our own Unisys IT operation has many production applications running our business on MCP. Those have all been moved from our own data center on an MCP Libra system to now running in the Microsoft Azure cloud. Our Unisys IT organization has been a long-time partner and user of Microsoft Office 365 and SharePoint in the cloud. Everything has now moved. This, in fact, was one of the last remaining Unisys IT operations that was not in the public cloud. That was part of our driver, and they are achieving the benefits that we had hoped for.
We also have two external clients, a banking partner is about to deploy a disaster recovery (DR) instance of their on-premises MCP banking application. That’s coming from our partner, Fiserv. Fiserv’s premier banking application is now available for running in Azure on our MCP systems. One of the clients is choosing to host a DR instance in Azure to support their on-premises production workload. They like that because, as Bob said, they only have to pay for it when they fire it up if they need to use that DR environment.
Once that contract is signed and we get agreement from that organization, we will be using that as one of our early use case studies.
Gardner: The public sector, with all of their mainframe apps, seems like a no-brainer to me for these transitions to the cloud. Any examples from the public sector that illustrate that opportunity?
Ellsworth: We have a number of customers, specifically on the Unisys MCP platform, that are evaluating moving their workloads from their data centers into the cloud. We don’t have a production system as far as I know yet, but they’re in the late stages of making that decision.
There are so many ways of utilizing the cloud, for things like DR, at a very low cost, instead of having to have a separate data center or failover system. Customers can even leave their production on-premises in the short-term and stand up their test and development in the cloud and run MCP system in that way.
And then, once they’re in the cloud, they gain the capability to set up a high-availability DR system or high-availability production system, either within the same Azure data center, or failover from one system to another if they have an outage, and all at a very low cost. So, there are great benefits.
One other benefit is elasticity. When I talk about customers, they say, “Well, gee, I have this end-of-month process and I need a larger mainframe then because of those occasional higher capacity requirements. Well, the beauty of the cloud is the capability to grow and shrink those VMs when you need more capacity for such end-of-month process, for example.
Again, you don’t have to pre-purchase the hardware. You really only pay for the consumption of the capacity when you need it. So, there are great advantages and that’s what we talk to customers about. They can get benefits from considering deploying new systems in the cloud. Those are some great examples of why we’re in late-stage conversations with several customers about deploying the solution.
Increased data analytics
Gardner: I supposed it’s a little bit early to address this, but are there higher-order benefits when these customers do make the cloud transition? You mentioned earlier AI, ML, and getting more of your data into an executable environment where you can take advantage of analytics across more and larger data sets.
Is there another shoe to drop when it comes to the ROI? Will they be able to do things with their data that just couldn’t have been done before, once you make a transition to cloud?
Ellsworth: Yes, that’s absolutely correct. When you move the systems up to the cloud, you’re now closer to all the new workloads and the advanced cloud services you can utilize to, for example, analyze all that data. It’s really about turning more data into intelligent action.
Lefebvre: And I can confirm that that’s a key element for our product proposition as well as from a ClearPath point of view. We have some existing technology, a particular component called Data Exchange, that does an outstanding change and data capture model. We can pump the data coming into that backend system of record and using, Kafka, for example, feed that data directly into an AI or ML application that’s already in place.
One of the key areas for future investment -- now that we have done the re-platforming to PaaS and IaaS – is extending our ePortal technology and other enabling software to ensure that these ClearPath applications really fit in well and leverage that cloud architecture. That’s the direction we see a lot of benefit in as we bring these applications into the public Azure cloud.
The cloud journey begins
Gardner: Chuck, if you are a ClearPath Forward client, you have these apps and data, what steps should you be taking now in order to put yourself in an advantageous position to make the cloud transition? Are there pre-steps before the journey? Or how should you be thinking in order to take advantage of these newer technologies?
Lefebvre: First of all, they should engage with their Unisys and Microsoft contacts that work with your organization to begin consultation on that journey. Data backup, data replication, DR, those elements around data and your policy with respect to data are the things that are likely going to change the most as you move to a different platform -- whether that’s from a Libra system to an on-premises virtualized infrastructure or to Azure.
What you’ve done for replication with a certain disk subsystem probably won’t be there any longer. It’ll be done in a different way, and likely it’ll be done in a better way. The way you do your backups will be done differently.
Now, we have partnered with Dynamic Solutions International (DSI) and they offer a virtualized virtual tape solution so that you can still use your backup scripts on MCP to do backups in exactly the same way in Azure. But you may choose to alter the way you do backups.
So, your strategy for data and how you handle that, which is so very important to these enterprise class mainframe applications, that’s probably the place where you’ll need to do the most thinking and planning, around data handling.
Gardner: For those familiar with BriefingsDirect, we like to end our discussions with a forward-looking vision, an idea of what’s coming next. So when it comes to migrating, transitioning, getting more into the cloud environments -- be that hybrid or pure public cloud -- what’s going to come next in terms of helping people make the transition but also giving them the best payoff when they get there?
The cloud journey continues
Ellsworth: It’s a great question, because you should think of the world of opportunity, of possibility. I look back at my 47 years in the industry and it’s been incredible to see the transformations that have occurred, the technology advancements that have occurred, and they are coming fast and furious. There’s nothing slowing it down.
And so, when we see the cloud today, a lot of customers are still considering the cloud for strategy and for building any new solutions. You go into the cloud first and have to justify staying on-premises, and then customers move to a cloud-only strategy where they’re able to not only deploy new solutions but migrate their existing workloads such as ClearPath up to the cloud. They get to a point where they would be able to shut down most of what they run in their data centers and get out of that business of operating IT infrastructure and having operation support provided for them as-a-service.
To the Cloud
Gardner: Chuck, for your installed base across the world, why should they be optimistic about the next two or three years? What’s your vision for how their situation is only going to improve?
Lefebvre: Everything that we’ve talked about today is focused on our ClearPath MCP market and the technology that those clients use. As we go forward into 2021, we’ll be providing similar capabilities for our ClearPath OS 2200 client base, and we’ll be growing the offering.
Today, we’re starting with the low-end of the customer base: development, test, DR, and the smaller images. But as the Microsoft Azure cloud matures, as it scales up to handle our scaling needs for our larger clients, we’ll see that maturing. We’ll be offering the full range of our products in the Azure cloud, right on up to our largest systems.
That builds confidence across
the board in our client base; in Microsoft and in Unisys. We want to crawl,
then walk, and then run. That journey, we believe, is the safest way to go. And
as I mentioned earlier, this initial workload transformation is occurring
through a re-platforming approach. The real exciting work is bringing cloud-native
capabilities to do better integration of those systems of record, with better
systems of engagement, that the cloud-native technology is offering.
Listen to the podcast. Find it on iTunes. Read a full transcript or download a copy. Sponsors: Unisys and Microsoft.
A discussion on how many organizations face a reckoning to move mainframe applications to a cloud model without degrading the venerable and essential systems of record. Copyright Interarbor Solutions, LLC, 2005-2020. All rights reserved.
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