The Existential Risk of Inaction

I spend a significant portion of my week sitting across the table, or the screen, from CIOs and CTOs of the world’s largest commercial enterprises and state agencies. For years, the conversation regarding the mainframe sitting in their data center was consistent: “It’s expensive, it’s clunky, but it works. And we are terrified to touch it.”

For a long time, that fear was rational. But as a senior executive, I am here to tell you that the calculus has fundamentally shifted. The risk of keeping your mainframe running now far outweighs the risk of modernizing it.

In the commercial sector, your competitors are born in the cloud, unencumbered by decades of technical debt. In the SLED (State, Local, and Education) space, constituents demand digital experiences that 40-year-old monolithic architectures simply cannot support. Furthermore, the workforce that built your COBOL, IMS, and Assembler logic is retiring. When they leave, the institutional knowledge of your core business logic leaves with them.

The answer lies in moving away from manual efforts and embracing the precision of automation with mLogica’s LIBER*M tools.

To understand why automation is the only viable path, we must acknowledge why previous modernization attempts failed. The industry is littered with the corpses of "rip-and-replace" projects that dragged on for five years only to be scrapped.

Manual rewrites rely on human interpretation of code that was often written before the developer attempting the rewrite was born. When you ask a modern developer to manually parse millions of lines of unstructured COBOL or JCL and rewrite it into Java, you introduce human error at scale. Business logic is misunderstood, edge cases are missed, and defects are hardcoded into the new system.

For a tax agency processing millions of dollars or a healthcare provider managing patient data, "mostly correct" is unacceptable. This history of failure created a paralysis where executives chose the slow bleed of mainframe maintenance fees over the potential heart attack of a failed migration.

This is where the conversation changes. Modernization is no longer an art; it is a science. Through our partnership with mLogica and their LIBER*M suite, many companies have moved beyond manual interpretation to automated, deterministic transformation.

The most significant anxiety for any SLED or commercial leader is the "cutover", that moment you switch off the legacy system.

With mLogica’s technologies, that anxiety is eliminated through parallel-run validation. Because the transformation is automated, we can run the legacy mainframe environment and the new cloud-based environment simultaneously. We feed the same inputs into both and compare the outputs down to the byte.

We don't guess if the system works; we prove it. You can test the modernized system for accuracy, performance, and resilience while your legacy environment remains fully operational. You only flip the switch when the data proves that the new system is an exact functional replica of the old one, just faster, more agile, and more secure.

Once the automated heavy lifting is done, the doors to true innovation open. You aren't just running COBOL on a cloud server; you are running a modern architecture.

• API-Driven Integration: Your core data is no longer locked in a silo. It becomes accessible, allowing for real-time data flows to mobile apps and partner agencies.
• Cloud Elasticity & Scalability: No more provisioning hardware for peak loads. You consume only what you need, leveraging the infinite elasticity of the hyperscale cloud.
• Security & Observability: Legacy mainframes rely on "security through obscurity." Modern cloud environments offer identity management, encryption at rest and in transit, and deep observability that mainframes cannot match.

As the industry prepares for re:Invent 2025, enterprises running legacy workloads have a significant opportunity, however, with a narrowing window, to modernize before operational risk increases or talent shortages intensify. Organizations taking early steps this year will benefit from smoother planning cycles, improved cost forecasting and early adoption of new AWS modernization capabilities.

You cannot afford to wait until the legacy hardware fails or the last engineer retires. The time to assess your environment is now.

1) Request an Automated Modernization Assessment

Stop guessing about the complexity of your estate. Let us run an automated discovery on your mainframe environment to give you a precise roadmap, cost analysis, and timeline for modernization.

modernize-now@mlogica.com

2) Download the Automated Modernization Whitepaper

Need the technical details for your architecture team? Download our comprehensive guide on deterministic code transformation and parallel-run methodologies.

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