Kyndryl eyes mainframe workloads in ASEAN

Kyndryl has teamed up with Amazon Web Services (AWS) to help enterprises in ASEAN modernise and migrate their mainframe workloads to the cloud through a new centre of excellence in Malaysia.

Bringing together the mainframe modernisation expertise of both companies, the centre will provide enterprises with strategic guidance as well as mainframe and cloud skills to define a modernisation strategy and help them get more value from their mainframe applications.

For example, banks and financial institutions that have traditionally relied on mainframes to run core banking functions will be able to use the centre’s expertise to scale their resources dynamically, handle peak transaction volumes and reduce the costs associated with legacy applications.

Pete Murray, country manager of AWS Malaysia, said Malaysia’s mainframe modernisation centre of excellence builds on Kyndryl’s partnership with AWS as a Premier Tier services partner, and will help customers optimise workloads across cloud and mainframe environments.

“Customers across ASEAN are focused on optimising their investments in technology to ensure they can meet data residency requirements, achieve lower latency and benefit from the improved scale that the upcoming AWS infrastructure region in Malaysia will offer,” he added.

Effendi Azmi Hashim, managing director of Kyndryl Malaysia and Indonesia, noted that the centre will help advance digital transformation in the financial services sector and other industries across the region, whether they choose to modernise the mainframe, integrate mainframe workloads with cloud, or move those workloads to the cloud.

Kyndryl and AWS have been operating a similar centre in the US since November 2023, offering a suite of capabilities spanning application replatforming and refactoring, data replication between the mainframe and AWS, and cloud-native services for mainframe modernisation.

According to Kyndryl’s 2023 State of mainframe modernisation report, 95% of organisations plan to move some applications off the mainframe. About a quarter are integrating mainframe applications with cloud, while nearly a fifth plan to use additional as-a-service options alongside cloud infrastructure services.

Organisations often cite the compute power and scalability of mainframes as reasons for continuing their use of the technology, particularly among banks that process a large number of transactions. While these organisations are unlikely to move off the mainframe completely, they are looking to integrate their mainframe architecture with cloud to get the benefits of cloud architecture.