{
  "id": 2431925,
  "title": "Transforming Mainframe Recovery",
  "url": "https://urgent.news/2026/08/21/transforming-mainframe-recovery",
  "topic": "tech",
  "section": "Tech",
  "published": "2026-08-21T19:59:32.000Z",
  "source": {
    "name": "DevOps.com",
    "slug": "devops-com",
    "url": "https://devops.com/transforming-mainframe-recovery/"
  },
  "original_language": "en",
  "account": "Mainframe environments, long revered for their reliability, present challenges when it comes to recovery. While offering redundancy, automatic recovery and high availability (leading to \"nine nines\" reliability or 31.56 milliseconds of downtime per server annually), these systems can mask recovery planning and resource allocation shortcomings. Organizations often assume their mainframes are inherently protected from downtime, which can be misleading. Critical business workloads are increasingly shifting to the mainframe, yet many still rely on outdated disaster recovery tools designed for hardware failures or site outages. These practices are ill-equipped to handle modern cyber threats that can simultaneously breach production systems, steal administrative credentials, and compromise recovery copies. To ensure effective recoverability, leaders must modernize their mainframe recovery tools and processes. While cautious, many organizations are gradually modernizing their mainframes to support contemporary workloads. However, transitioning to cloud-enabled object storage, while beneficial for data management, can provoke cybersecurity, regulatory, and business continuity concerns. BMC AMI Cloud addresses these challenges by simplifying secondary data management for the Z platform, transitioning backup and recovery workflows from traditional tape infrastructure to cloud object storage. This approach maintains the mainframe as the primary transactional system while securely storing secondary data in the cloud. Key advantages include cyber protection via immutable, air-gapped copies of mainframe data, enabling clean-room and bare-metal restores directly from object storage. The technology also facilitates data conversion into open formats for AI and analytics. A case in point is Nedbank, a major South African bank, which migrated critical capabilities to the cloud with BMC AMI Cloud. The organization achieved an 98% reduction in backup times, transforming a 48-hour backup process into a 36-minute operation. An upcoming webinar on September 2 will delve further into leveraging this low-risk path to cloud cybersecurity, addressing concerns like tape-related costs, ransomware protection, geographic redundancy via AWS's global infrastructure, and safe integration of mainframe data into AI/ML models for enhanced business insights.",
  "summary": "Moving beyond disaster recovery, organizations can ensure business-critical mainframe environments. Over decades, the mainframe has earned a reputation for being synonymous with reliability. Many enterprise organizations continue to rely on the mainframe precisely because of the redundancy, automatic recovery, and availability that leads to “nine nines” reliability or 31.56 milliseconds of…",
  "key_points": [],
  "editors_take": null,
  "illustration": null,
  "coverage": {
    "outlets": 1,
    "also_reported_by": []
  },
  "ai_generated": true,
  "disclaimer": "Summaries, key points and the editor’s take are written by software from other outlets’ reporting and may contain errors — always check the linked original."
}