The automated approach can speed up the migration effort significantly—but experience has shown that it can create problems of its own. Companies often find that their automatically migrated applications are very difficult to maintain and manage. The good news is that there is a solution. The answer lies not in more technology, but rather in enhancing the migration process with a new methodology—one that helps ensure that the team managing the target application has the knowledge they need to work efficiently and effectively.

A recent survey of U.S. IT professionals found that over half (56%) say their IT infrastructures are mostly comprised of mainframe computers. And 80% said that the mainframe is extremely critical (41%) or very critical (39%) to their business operations.