by Joseph Brady, Director of Business Development / AWS and Cloud Alliance Lead at Treehouse Software and Andy Jones, Certified AWS Solutions Architect at Treehouse Software
There are many pioneering organizations with mainframe systems that have already begun their movement to the Cloud, and are now taking advantage of the new and powerful technologies delivering significant business benefits and competitive advantage, including:
Trade Capital Expense for Variable Expense – Instead of having to invest heavily in data centers and servers before you know how you’re going to use them, you can pay only when you consume computing resources, and pay only for how much you consume. https://aws.amazon.com/pricing/
Global Deployments – The AWS Cloud spans 22 geographic regions globally. Enterprises can easily deploy applications in multiple regions around the world with just a few clicks. This means you can provide lower latency and a better experience for your customers at minimal cost. https://aws.amazon.com/about-aws/global-infrastructure/regions_az/
Economies to Scale – By using Cloud computing, you can achieve a lower variable cost than you can get on your own, because usage from hundreds of thousands of customers is aggregated in the Cloud, providers such as AWS can achieve higher economies of scale, which translates into lower pay as-you-go prices. https://aws.amazon.com/economics/
Scale of Services – Amazon Web Services offers a broad set of global Cloud-based products including compute, storage, databases, analytics, networking, mobile, developer tools, management tools, IoT, security, and enterprise applications. These services help organizations move faster, lower IT costs, and scale. https://aws.amazon.com/products/
World Class Security – AWS security compliance is second to none and complies with the most stringent government and private sector requirements. https://aws.amazon.com/compliance/programs/
Extreme High Availability (HA) – The AWS Cloud spans 69 Availability Zones within 22 geographic Regions around the world https://aws.amazon.com/about-aws/global-infrastructure/regions_az/. By designing your services and applications to be redundant across AWS availability zones or regions, HA is enhanced far beyond a single on premises data center. https://aws.amazon.com/marketplace/solutions/infrastructure-software/high-availability
Testing at Scale – AWS servers and services can be created and charged on demand for a specific amount of time. This allows customer to create temporary large-scale test environments prior to deployment that are not practical for on premises environments. Large scale testing reduces deployment risks and helps to provide a better customer experience. https://aws.amazon.com/
Auto Scaling and Serverless Deployments – AWS has many serverless and autoscaling options available, allowing for scalable computing capacity as required. For example, AWS Lambda lets you run code without provisioning or managing servers. You pay only for the compute time you consume – there is no charge when your code is not running. Another example is Amazon Aurora Serverless, which is an on-demand, auto-scaling configuration for Amazon Aurora (MySQL-compatible edition), where the database will automatically start up, shut down, and scale capacity up or down based on your application’s needs. https://aws.amazon.com/serverless/
Customer Agility and Innovation – In a Cloud computing environment, new IT resources are only a click away, which means that you reduce the time to make those resources available to your developers from weeks to just minutes. This results in a dramatic increase in agility for the organization, since the cost and time it takes to experiment and develop is significantly lower. https://aws.amazon.com/architecture/
Infrastructure as Code – AWS CloudFormation provides a common language for you to describe and provision all the infrastructure resources in your Cloud environment. CloudFormation allows you to use programming languages or a simple text file to model and provision, in an automated and secure manner, all the resources needed for your applications across all regions and accounts. This gives you a single source of truth for your AWS resources. https://aws.amazon.com/cloudformation/
However, compared to the number of mainframe shops in enterprises that are just beginning to plan their moves to the Cloud, existing adopters’ numbers are still relatively small.
As an example of the current boom in overall Cloud growth, the worldwide public sector Cloud market will be growing to a staggering $331B by 2022 according to Gartner. By the end of 2019, more than 30% of technology providers’ new software investments will shift from Cloud-first to Cloud-only, further reducing license-based software spending and increasing subscription-based Cloud revenue. (Source: Forbes)
Treehouse Software is a well-established company serving mainframe customers since 1982. We are currently developing a strong presence in the emerging Cloud market space related to mainframe data migration, primarily through our partnership with Amazon Web Services (AWS). AWS is aware that most large enterprises use mainframe systems that are housing vast amounts of data encompassing historical, customer, logistics, etc., and they have helped us bring our tcVISION solution to the AWS Marketplace. tcVISION provides real-time replication between a variety of mainframe and non-mainframe sources, including (Mainframe): VSAM, IMS, Db2, CA Datacom, Adabas, CA IDMS, and Flat Files; and (Non-mainframe): AWS RDS databases, AWS Aurora, AWS S3, AWS Kinesis, PostgreSQL, MySQL, Kafka, MongoDB, Hadoop, Oracle, Microsoft SQL Server, IBM Db2 LUW and Db2 BLU, IBM Informix, SAP Hana, and many more.
AWS sales and technical leaders within various verticals (GovCloud, Nonprofit, K12/Higher Ed, Automotive, etc.) are also beginning to engage with Treehouse Software to learn more about our unique skills and solution that can help them tap into this potential goldmine of massive amounts of legacy data that needs to be moved to AWS.
Treehouse Software specializes in providing data replication for enterprise customers who want a fully developed and automated way to move data from their mainframe systems to the Cloud. Treehouse Software’s tcVISION is a low risk option that allows customers to immediately begin moving data to the Cloud while they work on the sometimes massive complexity of application migration. Our experience has shown that projects can become stalled while the application side is being figured out. For example, Treehouse Software recently became involved in a project with a government agency that was facing the complexity of a “big bang” migration, which is slowing the project. We are now presenting them with our tcVISION data replication solution option, where they can replicate data to AWS while maintaining their current environment for modernization and migration of their applications.
Additionally, Treehouse Software’s decades of experience developing software and working in the IBM mainframe environment, in addition to selling and supporting a comprehensive automated data replication product, is making us a desirable partner for AWS and many Cloud migration companies.
AWS recently published a blog about tcVISION, our Mainframe-to-Cloud data replication product: https://aws.amazon.com/blogs/apn/real-time-mainframe-data-replication-to-aws-with-tcvision-from-treehouse-software/
Additionally, here is a blog about Treehouse Software’s extensive mainframe experience: https://treehousesoftware.wordpress.com/2019/09/12/treehouse-softwares-differentiator-weve-been-helping-enterprise-mainframe-sites-since-1982/
If your enterprise is planning on riding the wave with a Mainframe-to-Cloud migration project, we would welcome the opportunity to help get you moving immediately with an online presentation and demonstration of our tcVISION data replication solution. Contact Treehouse Software today!
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