Enterprise Cloud Computing in the New Millennium

A recent study found that 70% of enterprises have either applications or infrastructure running in the cloud today—that’s up 12% from 2012. As well, since 2012 cloud investments by large-scale enterprises with over 1,000 employees have increased by 20%—on average spending over $3M. In 2015, it was estimated that 25% of IT budgets would be allocated to cloud solutions—with the highest percentage being allocated to SaaS models.

Furthermore, 70% of enterprises have at least one application or a portion of their computing infrastructure in the cloud—up from 60% of enterprises in 2012. Moreover, 20% plan to use cloud-based applications and/or computing infrastructure via the cloud in the next 12 months, and 15% within one to three years.

With the growth in cloud computing, a major inhibitor has reared its ugly head, and that is security—and it continues to be the major inhibitor to broad scale cloud adoption.

According to a 2012 study, 70% of respondents had “Concerns about the security of cloud computing solutions.” In addition, 30% found security more pressing than the closest challenge or barrier to implementation, which was 40% for “Concerns about access to information.”

This leads to the question: How do you enjoy the benefits of cloud computing while at the same time addressing security concerns and minimizing risk? The answer is simple: the mainframe. You can enjoy the benefits of cloud computing with the mainframe. When you look at what the mainframe has to offer in terms of security, it makes sense to develop your cloud computing platform on a scalable and secure foundation—the System z Modern Mainframe, which delivers:

Application Security
Data protection Controls
Hardware and application security
Operating System Integrity
Robust security controls
Secure architecture

Eight reasons why mainframes are relevant to today’s cloud environment

Here are eight advantages that the mainframe offers for cloud computing:

1. Centralized data

   Corporate production data still residing on the mainframe is estimated to be up to 70%, meaning that private clouds residing on System z have secure access to crucial information that if necessary is shared with sufficient access controls, encryption, data masking, data security, and integrity.

2. Compliance

   Support for industry standards, regulatory compliance, and best practices such as strong encryption,  secure endpoint communications, segmentation of duties, user auditing, and more.

3. Consolidated Workloads

   When you have optimized the virtual environment you’ll find it fairly easy to consolidate your various workloads on the mainframe while delivering any necessary isolation between virtual systems. You’ll also reduce the licensing fees incurred with distributed systems.

4. Flexible infrastructure

   With System z you have support for different virtualized environments to enable cloud implementation, including the z/VM operating system running virtual servers, logical partitions (LPARs), blade servers, and hypervisors.

5. Migration

   With easy migration of distributed workloads over to the mainframe virtualized environment, you reduce the number of distributed systems that need to be managed.

6. Reduced Total Cost of Ownership (TCO)

   A recent IBM study found that the three-year TCO for a System z mainframe cloud can be 75% less than a third-party provider’s public cloud and as much as 49% less than an x86-based private cloud.

7. Scalable support

   One modern mainframe not only can run its own environment, but also can virtualize hundreds or even thousands of more pedestrian servers—all at the same time. It provides an ideal platform for big data analytics, production processing, data warehouses, and web applications while supporting millions of users with exceptional performance.

8. Security

   You have much better control when you implement mainframe private cloud. It provides a high level of security transparency giving you a view across the enterprise. With the enterprise you can automate the monitoring and analysis of potential internal and external threats. Furthermore, with mainframe clouds you can also decrease the security threats that are inherent on public clouds with open networks.