Every morning, millions of people around the world perform the same, almost mechanical action: bringing their payment card close to a terminal, checking their balance on a mobile app or booking a train ticket to the other end of the country. All this is done in the aesthetically pleasing, responsive interfaces that we associate with modernity. Few people realise, however, that underneath this shiny layer of ‘front-end’ beats the heart of a technology that was already labelled an open-air museum in the 1990s.
The mainframe and the COBOL language – as they are referred to – are the cornerstones of the global economy. Although there is a cult of novelty in the IT world, business reality is verifying the ‘death of the mainframe’ narrative. Today, we must ask ourselves: are these systems really the ballast of the past, or are they the most solid insurance policy available to modern business?
The foundation of stability: Why don’t the giants go away?
In the technology sector, myths die a slow death. One of the most persistent is the belief that modern distributed architecture (microservices, cloud) can seamlessly replace the mainframe monolith. Meanwhile, banks, insurance companies, public administration systems and logistics giants still base their critical processes on COBOL. Why?
The answer is transactional performance, which cannot be easily faked. The mainframe was designed for one purpose – to handle a gigantic number of real-time input/output operations while maintaining almost 100 per cent availability. In a cloud architecture, latency resulting from communication between distributed servers can become an insurmountable barrier when processing thousands of transactions per second. The mainframe is a ‘money machine’ in the literal sense – it is the one that settles pensions, taxes and interbank transfers, with a stability that many modern platforms can only dream of.
The economics of code: When the cloud becomes a trap
Many business leaders look at the mainframe through the prism of the cost of maintaining their own infrastructure and licences (CapEx). Moving to a cloud model (OpEx) seems an enticing promise of savings and flexibility. However, the reality can be brutal on the wallet.
In a mainframe environment, every instruction has a measurable price. CPU consumption, database operations, working time – all of this translates into monthly invoices. This is why traditional COBOL programmers were (and are) masters of optimisation. Every millisecond saved is profit for the company.
By moving the same, often suboptimal processes to the cloud in a pay-as-you-go model, companies fall into a trap. Without deep code optimisation, the dynamic scaling of the cloud makes bills grow exponentially. Often, we find that escaping the ‘IBM monopoly’ ends up falling into an even more expensive dependency on cloud providers, where the cost of data transfer and computing power at massive transaction scale exceeds the budget for maintaining an in-house mainframe. Unsurprisingly, some organisations, after costly migration trials, are ‘falling off the cloud like rain’ and meekly returning to proven on-premise solutions.
Risk management: The skills gap as a real threat
The real threat to business is not mainframe technology itself, but what sociologists call the ‘silver tsunami’. The experts who have been building and maintaining these systems for the last 30-40 years are retiring.
For decades COBOL has been removed from university curricula as an ‘unattractive’ language. Young programmers prefer JavaScript or Python frameworks, which offer instant visual gratification, autocomplete code and modern development environments. Working in a mainframe, where the compiler is often crude and errors are pointed out with absolute precision, is not ‘sexy’.
For business, this is a critical situation. Unless there is a generational change, the systems that drive the economy will be left unattended. This is an operational risk greater than any hacking attack. The lack of specialists capable of optimising code and understanding the architecture of legacy systems could paralyse financial institutions within the next decade. Knowing how the ‘heart’ of a system works is now becoming a rarer and more valuable commodity than knowing the latest mobile app development framework.
A strategy for tomorrow: Modernisation instead of revolution
Instead of a radical and risky migration, more and more organisations are choosing the middle way – the hybrid model. This involves keeping a stable, optimised core in COBOL and encapsulating it with modern middleware layers. This allows the ‘old’ mainframe to communicate securely with new mobile applications or AI systems via APIs.
Modernisation does not necessarily mean demolishing foundations. It can mean strengthening them. Investing in training for existing IT teams, valuing mature talent (mentoring) and opening up to cross-functional collaboration on critical systems is the only way to maintain business continuity.
A heart that must beat
The mainframe does not need our pity or nostalgia. It is a technology that defends itself – with performance, stability and scale. But as business leaders, we need to stop treating it as an ’embarrassing secret’ hidden in the server room.
Recognising the value of these systems is the first step to securing the future. The mainframe is not a technology debt that needs to be repaid as soon as possible. It is a powerful, undervalued insurance policy. But in order for it to continue to protect our transactions and data, we need to nurture a new generation of ‘digital mechanics’ who will not be afraid to get their hands dirty in COBOL code. Because when the heart stops beating, even the most beautiful organism – which is the modern corporation – simply ceases to exist.
