70 pc of global CXOs see mainframe, legacy modernisation as top business priority: TCS
Feb 11, 2021
Mumbai (Maharashtra) [India], February 11 : More than 70 per cent of chief experience officers (CXOs) in global companies consider mainframe or legacy modernisation a strategic business priority for the next three years, according to a report released by Tata Consultancy Services (TCS) on Thursday.
The study conducted in collaboration with AWS and executed by IDG Research 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.
The survey showed over two-third of the respondents are using mainframe or legacy applications for core business operations and over 60 per cent for customer-facing functions.
Top three challenges with legacy systems were integration with new applications (61 per cent), lack of business agility (57 per cent) and security exposure (55 per cent).
The main barriers to migrating legacy systems to the cloud were concerns around security (44 per cent), disruption to operations (37 per cent) and reliability (33 per cent).
Greater agility to respond to market needs (45 per cent) is a key business objective in driving legacy modernisations followed by improving application performance or responsiveness (41 per cent) and improving availability or disaster recovery and improving compliance or security (38 per cent each).
Re-engineering or re-development (33 per cent) is the most preferred approach for legacy modernisation followed by lift-and-shift (20 per cent), retain-and-optimise (19 per cent) and refactor (9 per cent).
Most of the companies that participated in the survey are currently (64 per cent) or planning to (22 per cent) use tools to partially or fully automate modernisation.
"The survey reinforces our own experiences with customers across industries and markets," said Vijayalakshmi Gopal, Business Head of TCS MasterCraft.
"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."
