Introducing a new Control-M and AWS integration
Business modernization is a strategic priority for almost every company that wasn’t born digital native. As executives look to transform their IT environments to deliver better customer and employee experiences, cloud adoption is soaring. The benefits are well documented and clear. However, many organizations have heavily invested in large mainframe environments with critical systems of record. According to Precisely, mainframes handle 68 percent of the world’s production IT workloads. Migrating application and data workflows across complex hybrid-cloud environments isn’t simple.
Because mainframes are deeply embedded into organizations’ tech stacks, changes require extensive examination of many objects. This must be carried out very carefully, generally over long periods of time. That puts companies in the difficult position of having to run old and new workflows simultaneously. Many organizations that use mainframes also operate in heavily regulated industries and are subject to strict governance. That means many, if not all, tasks must be checked, tested, and re-checked to ensure compliance and mitigate risk. And finally, mainframe environments have often been in production for many years. Lots of institutional processes and knowledge have built up over time. Mainframe modernization requires both procedural and cultural shifts. However, companies are not alone on this journey.
BMC works with organizations around the world to address these challenges and successfully deliver on their modernization projects. As an enabler of the Autonomous Digital Enterprise (ADE) framework, our solutions make it easier for companies to manage their constantly evolving tech stacks in an agile fashion to better support stakeholders. Control-M, BMC’s market-leading application and data workflow orchestration platform, gives developers, data engineers, and business users freedom to innovate securely across mainframe and cloud environments within a secure orchestration framework.
To help organizations better address their mainframe modernization challenges, we’ve partnered with Amazon to launch a new Control-M integration with the AWS Mainframe Modernization Service.
Workflow orchestration meets mainframe modernization
Companies can leverage Control-M’s deep operational capabilities with the AWS Mainframe Modernization Service to preserve the continuity of mission-critical business outcomes delivered by automating application and data workflows in production, across distributed, hybrid, and mainframe environments. Control-M easily integrates, automates, and orchestrates new applications and technologies with interfaces for IT operations, data engineers, developers, and business users across their on-premises and AWS platform.
Gur Steif, president of digital business automation at BMC, summed it up well: “Our Control-M customers are focused on driving modernization initiatives and delivering transformative digital experiences for their external and internal customers. We are proud to collaborate with AWS on this very important leg of that modernization journey. With this new integration, our customers can modernize their mainframes and utilize the power of AWS to give stakeholders freedom to collaborate, to turn data into actionable insights faster, and to leverage the latest AWS services using the Control-M platform.”
The AWS Mainframe Modernization Service helps modernize mainframe applications to AWS cloud-native managed runtime environments. It provides tools and resources to help plan and implement migration and modernization. With the integration, job creation and monitoring can be performed entirely via any Control-M interface, which enables organizations to manage AWS Mainframe Modernization Service jobs just like any other Control-M workload.
In addition, users can submit or cancel batch jobs and review the details of batch job runs. Each time a user submits a batch job, the AWS Mainframe Modernization Service creates a separate batch job run, which can easily be monitored. Using AWS Mainframe Modernization Service web console, users can search for batch jobs by name, provide job control language (JCL), script files, and parameters to batch jobs.
The integration also helps companies:
- Reduce talent gaps
- Support rapid innovation with an agile DevOps approach
- Provide easier access to applications and data without significant changes
- Optimize the costs of running or extending applications
- Maximize business agility
Partnering for success
BMC’s Global Outsourcer System Integrator organization and global partner network will collaborate with companies to help them build a solid mainframe modernization strategy, and to determine the right type of migration for each organization. They’ll also help companies best leverage Control-M throughout the journey.
I recently spoke to Raul Ah Chu, BMC’s Global VP of Sales for the Global Outsourcer System Integrator organization. He is very excited to bring the power of our GSI partner community and their business modernization expertise to our customers. BMC and AWS are working closely with our GSI partners to ensure that companies wishing to take advantage of the AWS Mainframe Modernization Service can do so while maintaining all the benefits of their Control-M platform.
In addition to our AWS partnership, companies will be able to leverage AWS’ Prescriptive Guide, which includes time-tested strategies, best practices, and guidance to help accelerate cloud migration, modernization, and optimization projects. In it, experts from AWS and its partners share practical real-world experience. The guide will help companies navigate the complex cloud landscape with specific approaches through how-to guides, step-by-step tasks, architecture, and code.
The path forward
With Control-M and the AWS Mainframe Modernization Service, companies have the right tools and partners to navigate the migration path at the speed their business requires (whether replatforming, refactoring, or both are required). Control-M will continue to manage all critical business workflows with all the deep operational capabilities organizations depend on. And once they start their cloud migration journey, Control-M will enable them to seamlessly manage all business workflows on a single pane of glass, mainframe to cloud. This gives them a single strategic platform to give all stakeholders the freedom to drive business outcomes faster within a secure orchestration framework.
Additional Control-M integrations with AWS
This adds to an already robust list of Control-M integrations available for the AWS ecosystem including AWS Lambda, AWS Step Functions, AWS Batch, S3 Buckets, AWS Glue, and AWS Databricks. Companies that are re-platforming mainframe applications using the AWS Mainframe Modernization Service can seamlessly orchestrate application and data workflows running in the re-platformed environment while managing dependencies with applications that may still be on-premises.
For more information about this integration please visit the AWS Prescriptive Guidance: Using Control-M workflow orchestrator integration with AWS Mainframe Modernization.
