What does the word mainframe bring to mind? An old legacy company that thinks cloud security has more holes than a slice of Swiss cheese? The reality is that many companies running on mainframes are raring to move to cloud. But it’s hard, time-consuming work, and they lack a practical playbook. They need a strategy that splits the work in two: all at once and over time.

Some enterprises have been married to their mainframes for 20, 30, 40 years, according to Joshua Yulish (pictured, left), chief executive officer at TmaxSoft Inc. They’re not ignorant of the advantages moving to cloud might offer.

“If it was easy, they would have done it,” Yulish said. “It’s not. It’s a very closed, difficult-to-disrupt system.”

But it can be done. “The people that do it successfully are the people that have a change-agent mentality that understand, ‘If I ignore the problem, my business — not just my IT — but my business is going to suffer,'” he said.

With smart planning, they can start moving apps to cloud right away and shift IT spend to innovation.

Yulish and Sri Akula (pictured, right), chief information officer at HealthPlan Services Inc., spoke with John Walls (@JohnWalls21), host of theCUBE, SiliconANGLE Media’s mobile livestreaming studio, and guest host Justin Warren (@jpwarren), chief analyst at PivotNine Pty Ltd, during AWS re:Invent in Las Vegas. They discussed how legacy companies can move out of the mainframe rut. (* Disclosure below.)

Sifting first movers from late bloomers

TmaxSoft delivers legacy-modernization software, mainframe rehosting and other services to digitally-transforming organizations. HealthPlan tapped TmaxSoft to jumpstart its move to cloud.

“I think it’s fair to say, healthcare has been lagging at adopting the cloud technology — whether it be [due to] PII or PHI or HIPAA regulations,” Akula said.

TmaxSoft helped HealthPlan and other companies launch a one-two-punch modernization scheme. Rewriting apps for cloud could take years. New technologies come out and introduce new elements, disrupt, and possibly cancel plans. The solution is to move what is ripe as quickly as possible while considering the big picture more carefully.

“The new thing comes out in a year. It impacts that project for them and it makes it very difficult,” Yulish said. “We’ve helped them move off in six to 12 months on average. So now you can, more rapidly, solve your initial pain and then look at your longer-term journey in a way that allows you to do it all at once and over time.”

Watch the complete video interview below, and be sure to check out more of SiliconANGLE’s and theCUBE’s coverage of AWS re:Invent. (* Disclosure: TmaxSoft Inc. sponsored this segment of theCUBE. Neither TmaxSoft nor other sponsors have editorial control over content on theCUBE or SiliconANGLE.)

Photo: SiliconANGLE