70 percent of global CXOs see mainframe and legacy modernisation as top business priority: TCS survey

Survey commissioned by Tata Consultancy Services and AWS reveals challenges posed by legacy systems, perceived benefits of modernisation and cloud migration, and the preferred approaches

Mumbai: Tata Consultancy Services (TCS), (BSE: 532540, NSE: TCS), a leading global IT services, consulting, and business solutions organisation, published the results of its global survey that reveals that more than 70 percent of CxOs of global companies consider mainframe or legacy modernisation a strategic business priority for the next three years.

The study, conducted in collaboration with AWS, surveyed 211 CxOs and senior decision makers from companies that currently have legacy or mainframe applications. It highlights noteworthy trends on how companies view the future of legacy and mainframe applications in their digital transformation, bottlenecks and challenges in migrating those applications, and the preference for microservices-based technologies. Key findings from the report include:

  • Over two-third of the respondents are using mainframe or legacy applications for core business operations and over 60 percent for customer-facing functions.
  • Top three challenges with legacy systems were integration with new applications (61 percent), lack of business agility (57 percent) and security exposure (55 percent).
  • The main barriers to migrating legacy systems to the cloud were concerns around security (44 percent), disruption to operations (37 percent) and reliability (33 percent).
  • Greater agility to respond to market needs (45 percent) is a key business objective in driving legacy modernisations, followed by improving application performance / responsiveness (41 percent), and improving availability / disaster recovery and improving compliance / security (38 percent each).
  • Re-engineering / redevelopment (33 percent) is the most preferred approach for legacy modernisation, followed by lift and shift (20 percent), retain and optimise (19 percent), and refactor (9 percent).
  • Most of the companies that participated in the survey are currently (64 percent) or planning to (22 percent) use tools to partially or fully automate modernisation.

“The survey reinforces our own experiences with customers across industries and markets. They are giving the highest priority to legacy and mainframe modernisation in their digital transformation programmes, especially during the pandemic. Enterprises are looking for partners who can help mitigate the risks of disruption and deliver high-quality outcomes with speed to market. TCS’s deep contextual knowledge, strategic focus on cloud, end-to-end modernisation services powered by intelligent automation products like TCS MasterCraft™ TransformPlus, organisational design and key partnerships with hyperscalers have made us the preferred partner in their cloud migration journeys,” said Vijayalakshmi Gopal, business head, TCS MasterCraft.

The survey, conducted by IDG Research, polled respondents with a title of director or above, from companies across industries, ranging from mid-sized (1,000+ employees) to large (10,000+ employees). Read the full report here: https://mastercraft.tcsapps.com/transformplus-survey-Mainframe-Modernization-Trends