Arcati Strategy Papers
2026
Mainframe trends, strategies and opportunities
Six talking points for 2026 and beyond
A decade ago, who could have predicted we’d be living in a golden age for the mainframe, with major investment and the platform acting as the backbone of today’s hybrid IT strategies? This article summarizes some of the issues around this continued popularity and a few strategy areas that organizations should be considering in the months and years ahead. It references several sources, including the 2026 Arcati Mainframe User Survey.
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From the Super Bowl to the System of Record:
Why Winning Runs on Data Integrity
The Super Bowl looks like a game of skill and instinct: a quarterback scans the defense, the coach makes a call in seconds, a receiver adjusts a route in motion. All while 70,000 people hold their breath.
From the outside, it feels like improvisation under pressure. But modern football doesn’t run on instinct alone, or skill, or even IQ. It runs on data.
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2025
Follow the leaders:
5 things we learned from the latest tech stack trends
When it comes to business, getting your tech stack right is a big deal. The ideal mix of cloud, mainframe, and distributed servers can strategically slash IT costs and even outperform rival organizations. With IT now consuming over 34% of total operating costs, how businesses balance their tech stack can be the difference between leading the market or falling behind.
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Mainframe Security in 2025:
Countering New Threats, Using AI, and Getting the Basics Right
As we moved into 2025, two trends were front of mind for many of our clients: their continued efforts to achieve a Zero Trust security stance in the face of an evolving threat landscape, and the unstoppable rise of artificial intelligence – countering the risks of AI while seizing the opportunities it presents.
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What Steam Can Teach Mainframes
My father passed away recently, and I found myself thinking about him. He had many hobbies, but only one that caught my attention: building small-scale models. He had a steam train from when he was a boy, and at times, he would work on a small model railroad. Of course, I “helped” him, which sparked a bit of passion and interest in wanting to build a model railroad of my own.
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2024
Mainframe is a Part of Your Cloud Strategy. Now What?
Three Ways to Include Mainframe Workloads in Your Hybrid Cloud
If Mainframe were an athlete, it would have multiple MVP titles. So would Cloud. Now, this sounds like the beginning of a championship team. But, just as great players alone don’t bring home the pennant (or trophy, depending on your sport), neither do great technologies. You’ve got to bring those “players” on your IT roster together and integrate them into a cohesive unit that allows each one to shine. That’s what makes a championship team.
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Micro-segmentation Keeps Sensitive Mainframe Data in Compliance
Mainframes hold an organization’s most critical and sensitive business data, making it crucial to ensure that data is secure and meets the strictest privacy regulations.
Controlling access through network micro-segmentation is an effective way to protect sensitive data on mainframes by isolating applications or devices. Such isolation is required in heavily regulated industries with compliance standards such as the Payment Card Industry Data Security Standard (PCI DSS), Health Insurance Portability and Accountability Act (HIPAA), and General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR).
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The IBM Mainframe is Still the Real Deal
DataKinetics’ CEO Allan Zander’s article appeared on the Planet Mainframe blog in 2021, and it made some waves in the distributed systems world – see Hacker News discussion. The IT folks without much knowledge of IBM mainframe architecture refuse to believe the numbers in the article, while others lambaste the article for being old. Some of the comments are fair, but as AWS, Google, et al, provide more powerful cloud/distributed solutions, IBM does the same with its mainframe platform.
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