We live in a data-driven world. Thanks to the modern digital economy, organizations are able to collect data that businesses of the past would have only dreamed of, tracking everything from financial transactions to customer habits, geographic and demographic information, and more. The mainframe plays a crucial role in the collection and retention of this data. While the exact numbers may vary (with some as high as 80 percent) recent studies agree that the majority of corporate data resides on the mainframe.
Company policies and industry and governmental regulations often require that this information be stored for years. With the platform’s longstanding role as the transactional workhorse behind financial, insurance, retail, and healthcare industries, this means that organizations have decades of current and historical data that can be mined to extract new and valuable insights—about their business and their customers—in order to identify opportunities for innovations that will better serve their customers.
This potential is often overlooked. Written in formats unreadable by most analytics engines, mainframe data traditionally has been stored on tape or virtual tape libraries (VTL) and then, all too often, forgotten. Slower access to the data, and the time and effort required to transform it for consumption, have discouraged organizations from realizing its full value.
At BMC, we believe there is a better way. We believe seamless integration of your data with a hybrid infrastructure, whether that be on-premises, hybrid, or cloud, object storage opens up a new future of possibilities for you. By moving away from the paradigm of storing data in proprietary mainframe hardware stacks and instead establishing a bi-directional data flow and integration, you can immediately and seamlessly share your mainframe data in an analytics-ready environment. Making your core business data accessible to analytics services and the power of artificial intelligence and machine learning (AI/ML) enables you to unleash potential that your business already possesses, helping to drive business transformation that will delight your customers and give you a competitive edge.
BMC AMI Cloud Analytics
The ability to realize the hidden potential of mainframe data is one of the reasons BMC is so excited to announce the BMC AMI Cloud portfolio. Alongside data management and security solutions, the new BMC AMI Cloud Analytics solution connects your mainframe data with the hybrid cloud with easily-accessible object storage, then transforms it into open formats for consumption by analytics engines and AI/ML applications.
As opposed to data being accessed on tape or VTLs, which can cause bottlenecks, and then being transformed on the mainframe (thus incurring processing costs), BMC AMI Cloud Analytics allows faster data processing at scale. The solution uses the IBM® System z® Integrated Information Processor (zIIP) to queue mainframe-formatted data for transfer into the cloud, where it is then transformed to the target format, giving you faster access to valuable insights while avoiding expensive mainframe CPU consumption.
Realizing your data’s potential
As organizations collect and store higher volumes of data than ever before, safeguarding and protecting that data has become not only a business imperative, but a legal and regulatory one, as well. Those managing mainframe data must consider the way it is archived, how to recover it in the event of a disaster or data loss, how to protect it from cyberattacks, and how to gain value from the insights it contains.
While we’ve focused on data analytics in this blog post, BMC AMI Cloud solutions not only enable you to unlock mission-critical data and make it actionable, they also help you modernize your core infrastructure with cloud-native backup, disaster recovery, and data management, as well as strengthen your defenses against cyberthreats.
The possibilities provided by a hybrid cloud data strategy are endless. Now is the time to consider how you can modernize your data management and unlock the potential your data contains.
To learn more about BMC AMI Cloud solutions, visit our BMC AMI Cloud page.
