6 ways mainframes are a strategic asset in the AI era

AI is at the forefront of an increasing number of business decisions in the IT business landscape. From driving productivity to providing next-level insights, AI is fundamentally transforming how modern enterprises operate. Meanwhile, mainframes continue to handle more than 70% of the world’s transactional workloads across industries and have evolved to fuel today’s digital innovation.

Organizations looking to achieve true innovation realize that mainframes and AI are partners and the catalysts to future initiatives and strategies. Major focus areas include built-in AI capabilities, critical reliability, security architecture, compliance, processing power, adaptability and flexibility. Put simply, mainframes provide advantages that are indispensable in modern enterprise computing and AI business strategies.

Mainframes have redefined their role within a modern IT infrastructure. These systems empower organizations through on-chip-integrated AI accelerators, driving speed and scale with lower latency to help businesses achieve more. Today’s mainframes are powerhouses able to handle 1 trillion web transactions daily with security and reliability as top priorities. And as organizations are quickly realizing, AI-powered solutions require massive amounts of energy and processing power.

With AI infused directly into mainframe operations to boost processing, businesses can achieve real-time insights with increased throughput and reduced response times. By keeping inferencing attached to the mainframe, organizations can achieve AI outcomes faster and more cost-effectively.

When minutes of downtime can cost millions of dollars, today’s mainframes stand out with their legendary reliability. With 99.99999% uptime performance—translating to mere seconds of downtime per year or less—current mainframes provide the continuous operational capabilities that modern businesses demand. It isn’t just about keeping systems running; it’s about maintaining the trust of customers, partners and stakeholders who depend on always-available services.

For example, when major banks process millions of transactions during shopping holidays, they need high-speed, reliable processing that won’t leave customers waiting when it’s time to check out. With banking, healthcare and other data-intensive industries, the minimal downtime risk offered by mainframes is a strategic imperative.

As these industries integrate AI tools into their own operations, this uptime helps reduce a multitude of challenges, including maintaining access to valuable data and insights. The mainframe simply has no competitor in terms of rapid response times for faster business insights, expertly delivered by AI solutions.

With the emergence of increasingly sophisticated cyberthreats, mainframes offer a strategic advantage through their comprehensive security architecture.

Mainframes provide a level of security that is woven into their very fabric through these features:

• Integrated encryption technologies
• Sophisticated access control mechanisms
• Intrusion detection systems

Modern mainframes take real-time threat detection a step further with quantum-safe and AI-accelerated capabilities to proactively address the future of cyberthreats. Companies can bolster security measures using AI by detecting anomalies and generating reports that lead to valuable threat-related information.

Many modern mainframes have built-in compliance frameworks and robust audit trailing. This makes them valuable for organizations that use sensitive data in their AI and need to adhere to strict regulatory requirements. For instance, insurance companies must securely handle valuable information, such as patient information, medical records and billing information. This inherent security architecture can reduce risk, simplify compliance and provide peace of mind for organizations handling sensitive operations.

While cloud platforms excel in many areas, mainframes remain highly effective in handling high-volume, complex transactional workloads. Mainframes have the power to fully leverage the potential of AI-driven solutions.

Their ability to process millions of transactions per second with microsecond response times makes mainframes ideal for achieving real-time financial processing, large-scale data transformations and critical business operations. Low-latency inferencing for time-sensitive work, such as in-transaction or real-time workloads, helps ensure insight-driven results are delivered to businesses and their customers at a high volume and with speed.

The mainframe’s high-speed processing power translates directly into business capabilities, such as the ability to handle peak workloads during holiday shopping, process end-of-day global banking transactions or manage airline reservation systems. In each of these scenarios, the mainframe is the quiet hero driving value for customers.

While initial investments in mainframe technology are substantial, the long-term economic benefits have been shown to outweigh the costs. Through consolidated infrastructure footprints, reduced operational expenses and predictable performance characteristics, mainframes typically demonstrate a lower total cost of ownership compared to distributed systems that handle similar workloads.

Several mainframe features contribute to the economic efficiency:

• Moving multiple workloads onto a single system
• Minimizing costly downtime and recovery operations
• Reducing power and cooling requirements compared to distributed server farms

The cost benefits go beyond the system, too. AI-driven systems require less maintenance and workforce effort due to intelligent controls, detections and alerts.

Modern mainframes are built to reduce energy consumption and real estate footprints—whether on-prem or in a data center. This focus on sustainability will not only boost ROI but also improve data center efficiency for a positive environmental impact.

Mainframes demonstrate strategic agility by seamlessly integrating with cloud services to complete a digital transformation strategy with AI at the center. By supporting popular programming languages, containerization and microservice architectures, mainframes help organizations use their investments while adopting modern development practices.

A significant 88% of the 2,500 global IT executives surveyed by the IBM Institute for Business Value (IBV) agree that application modernization on mainframes is essential to long-term success. Developers can use AI to modernize or build applications faster and more efficiently, all while closing skill gaps.

Adaptability is the key to optimizing workloads and employing new AI capabilities while still reducing costs and safeguarding mission-critical data. Mainframes serve as a bridge between established systems and emerging technologies, providing a stable platform for innovation while maintaining operational excellence.

As organizations redefine what’s possible with AI solutions, mainframes continue to evolve and adapt as vehicles for business transformation. Forward-thinking organizations recognize the strategic value of mainframes as a foundation for innovation and growth. Their unique combination of reliability, security, processing power, adaptability and economic efficiency makes them an essential tool for successful enterprise operations.

Read the Mainframes as mainstays of digital transformation report by IBM IBV