Racks at an IBM data centre in Dallas.Bloomberg
Farhaz Thobani is the president of Kyndryl Canada. Kyndryl is an international IT infrastructure services provider.
The mainframe is the original enterprise computing platform. Over its 60-year history, this powerful computer, which processes and stores large amounts of data, has been the backbone of many of Canada’s government services and major financial institutions. Whether you withdraw cash at an ATM, access Canada’s health care system or use your mobile phone, it’s a mainframe that quietly, reliably and securely processes the back-end operations that make everyday life possible.
You may not know it, but mainframes are facing a major problem.
Most of today’s computer programmers don’t know the technology languages that run mainframes. Meanwhile, a generation of mainframe experts is reaching retirement age – and taking their deep knowledge with them.
It gets worse. Depending on the nature of the data hosted on mainframes, many organizations insist, or laws and regulations require, that such data be stored in Canada and accessible only by Canadians. So not only are there too few mainframe programmers to go around, there are some practical limitations when it comes to leveraging resources outside our borders.
Most business leaders are aware of the problem, but many lack the means to address it. According to Kyndryl’s latest mainframe study, 90 per cent of organizations plan to continue running their mission-critical workloads on mainframes for the foreseeable future, but the majority (56 per cent) lament the fact that most people entering the work force do not have mainframe skills. I have heard from many IT leaders in Canada that it can take months to fill a role. And with only a handful of Canadian universities offering mainframe-related courses, the talent gap will continue to widen.
The good news is that there are several steps we can take to help ensure both business continuity and innovation at the enterprise and government levels. A short list would include filling the pipeline of future mainframe talent by expanding postsecondary training in mainframe programming. Academic courses, industry certifications and mentoring also have the potential to bring new, mid-career and non-traditional workers into the field. The focus would be on skills, not degrees.
New technologies such as artificial intelligence also have an important role to play. The convergence of AI, mainframe and cloud computing is shaping the evolution of IT. As mainframe customers embrace the hybrid cloud era, they must modernize to allow integration and deployment of data and applications across multiple platforms. In other words, the future of enterprise IT will encompass a mix of approaches to computing, with some systems running independently and others in combination to capitalize on the best capabilities of each. AI will serve as the connective tissue among various types of systems to help process the massive amounts of data required to spot trends, detect cybersecurity threats and turn “ones and zeroes” into actionable insights.
Embedding various types of AI into mainframe and hybrid cloud environments can also help augment human capabilities and streamline automation of business processes, which can help take the pressure off when it comes to mainframe skills in the short term, giving tech talent the time to develop those skills. This enables organizations to decrease manual interventions, process time and software costs. The AI-driven operational insights can enable more pro-active and predictive management of mainframe systems and provide visibility and control over mainframe performance and costs.
Developers can also deploy generative AI tools to help write code documentation, increase productivity and modernize or convert classic mainframe code to languages such as Java and C#.
Solving the mainframe skills shortage isn’t simply a challenge for Canada’s core infrastructure businesses and government services, it’s an imperative. It’s important to act now to help ensure that this trusted and secure technology continues to serve our needs while evolving its capabilities for the challenges of the future.