Why mainframes still matter in today’s digital era?

For decades, mainframes have carried a reputation for big investments, large footprints, high maintenance costs and a need for specialised expertise. Yet, they remain the backbone of the world’s most critical systems. In fact, the mainframe market is projected to reach US$13.34 billion by 2030, and 70 percent of Fortune 500 companies continue to rely on them.

A 2024 Forrester report revealed that 61 percent of global infrastructure decision-makers use mainframes, and among those, 54 percent plan to increase usage in the next two years. So, clearly, mainframes bring speed, security and a powerful computing technology.

The reasons reflect why industries, such as banking, insurance, health care, retail and automotive, trust mainframes for their unmatched transaction processing, reliability and security.

But here’s the catch: The digital era is rewriting the rules in agility, culture and adoption. Mainframes must, therefore, evolve to catch up with the pace.

What is changing?

Mainframes have transformed dramatically from room-sized processors to cloud-ready, AI-enabled platforms that are leaner cabinet-sized, often fitting in a single rack footprint.

Modern mainframes are far more efficient in power and cooling,―thanks to modern silicon and packaging built for extreme parallelism, supporting thousands of simultaneous threads.

Today, they support hybrid cloud, microservices and DevOps, aligning with business demands for agility, cost-efficiency and innovation.

So, what’s driving this evolution?

1. Business agility: The highly competitive market demands that businesses respond to market changes quickly and effectively. Refactoring traditional monolithic architectures into microservices and DevOps pipelines allows faster deployment.
2. Cost optimisation: High operational and infrastructure costs have pushed organisations towards hybrid-cloud strategies, balancing performance with affordability.
3. Tech advancements: The evolution of AI, ML, IoT and real-time data streaming has allowed mainframes to expand their capabilities by unlocking insights and automating processes that were once unimaginable.
4. Importance of seamless user experience: APIs are bridging the gap between core mainframe logic and modern interfaces, delivering consistent and rich customer experiences without ripping out the foundation.
5. Risk and resilience: Even in a cloud-first world, mainframes remain the gold standard for security, uptime and compliance, safeguarding mission-critical workloads with unmatched reliability.
   
   

The need for mainframe modernisation

With new hardware, software and tools being developed, mainframes now can support multiple operating systems and virtualisation, integrate with other systems, including cloud-based infrastructure, handle complex computing and scale effortlessly. Mainframe modernisation is all about strategic integration into a hybrid IT ecosystem.

To address the shifts and changing business scenarios, organisations have begun to:

• Encapsulate mainframe capabilities through APIs.
• Re-locate workloads on cloud platforms.
• Re-orchestrate legacy applications into microservices.
• Reimagine user experiences while keeping the core stable.
• Empower developers with tools that bridge old and new.
• Optimise costs without compromising performance.
• Re-address outdated systems with modern SaaS solutions.
  
  

These changes blend the strengths of the past with the speed of the future, where each step promises greater flexibility, scalability and speed. Studies show that companies register 9–10 percent efficiency gains post-modernisation, which shows the transformative potential of mainframe modernisation.

AI-driven future of the mainframe

Imagine a world where AI-assisted code refactoring is routine, predictive workload optimisation ensures peak efficiency, and automated compliance checks run continuously without human intervention. These capabilities are already accelerating modernisation, making it faster, smarter and far less risky.

By embedding AI into core systems, mainframes are evolving into intelligent platforms that deliver real-time insights, self-tuning performance, and proactive security, transforming them from traditional transaction engines into strategic enablers of digital innovation.

The question is no longer whether to use mainframes but how to enable a phased transition where modern platforms integrate seamlessly and coexist with cloud and distributed environments. The future belongs to systems that are leaner, faster and aligned with digital ambitions, which will be powered with appropriate AI intervention, driving relentless innovation for long-term business impact.

Would you consider a modernised approach to mainframes?