Bridging the Mainframe Talent Gap with IT Managed Services

Mainframes have been integral to essential business operations for decades, supporting the finance, healthcare, insurance, manufacturing, and government sectors. These powerful systems handle critical functions—including processing billions of financial transactions, managing healthcare claims, and performing real-time data analytics.

However, organizations today face a growing challenge: a critical shortage of skilled mainframe professionals. As experienced mainframe specialists retire, they take with them decades of valuable knowledge and technical expertise. This widening talent gap creates operational risks, jeopardizing system availability, complicating compliance management, and hindering strategic business initiatives.

By leveraging a Mainframe-as-a-Service (MFaaS) provider, organizations can achieve operational continuity without the challenges of recruitment, gain specialized expertise without retention concerns, and advance technologically without resource limitations. Let’s dive in.

Why Mainframes Remain Essential to Modern Enterprises

Despite outdated perceptions, modern mainframes remain indispensable for mission-critical business operations due to four key advantages:

• Unmatched Processing Power
• Exceptional Reliability
• Enterprise-Grade Security
• Cloud Integration
• Advanced Monitoring
  
  

1. Unmatched Processing Power

Today’s mainframes process up to 19 billion encrypted transactions daily–roughly 220,000 transactions per second–providing the throughput essential for banking, healthcare, and other high-volume industries.

2. Exceptional Reliability 

With 99.999% uptime, mainframes minimize costly service interruptions that can trigger financial losses, customer dissatisfaction, and regulatory issues

3. Enterprise-Grade Security

Mainframes feature sophisticated hardware encryption and granular access controls that meet the strictest compliance requirements across regulated industries.

4. Cloud Integration

Rather than being legacy systems, modern mainframes support cloud integration, API-driven development, and DevOps methodologies, making them fully compatible with contemporary enterprise architectures.

5. Advanced Monitoring 

This combination of performance, reliability, security, and integration capabilities explains why mainframes continue to power the world’s most demanding applications.

Hidden Costs of the Mainframe Skills Gap

The mainframe talent shortage creates far-reaching consequences that extend beyond visible operational disruptions. When seasoned professionals age out of the workforce, they take critical system knowledge with them. When critical expertise walks out the door, organizations face a host of hidden expenses:

Security and Compliance Gaps

Undocumented configurations and unpatched vulnerabilities become prime targets for attackers and open the door for security breaches and compliance failures.

Innovation Paralysis

Internal IT teams shift into survival mode, dedicating their bandwidth to urgent maintenance and mitigation instead of strategic initiatives. This paralysis not only undermines innovation but also allows agile competitors to gain traction.

Budget Instability

Emergency remediation efforts, unexpected overtime, and inefficient mainframe configurations escalate costs and lead to unpredictable budget fluctuations.

Business Continuity Vulnerabilities

Without a strong failover process and recovery plan, unplanned incidents can trigger extended outages.

Over time, these hidden costs can undermine security posture, attract regulatory penalties, derail modernization plans, and harm both an organization’s financial health and brand reputation.

Leveraging Managed Services for Sustainable Solutions

Partnering with certified IT managed service providers offers a proven path to closing the mainframe talent gap and driving long-term business value. Here’s how mainframe managed services can deliver sustainable solutions:

1. Around-the-Clock Specialist Support

By extending your team with dedicated mainframe experts, you gain 24x7 coverage for incident response, maintenance, software advocacy, and vendor partnerships. These specialists bring deep mainframe expertise to your IT environment to ensure that all critical systems remain stable and continuously performing.

2. Advanced Security and Compliance Assurance

Regulated industries require strict controls and continuous monitoring. Manager service teams implement enterprise encryption, access controls, and vulnerability management as part of a comprehensive mainframe cyber resiliency strategy. Combining mainframe and IT security measures with risk management strategies helps keep businesses resilient and ensures continuity.

3. Proactive Performance Monitoring

Avoid surprises with real-time insights into your workloads. Continuous application monitoring lets you detect performance bottlenecks and capacity issues before they impact end users. Proactive alerts and automated remediation free your team to focus on strategic initiatives rather than mitigating mainframe complications.

4. Scalable Systems and Network Management

When business demands fluctuate, you need infrastructure that can grow or contract seamlessly. With managed services like Mainframe-as-a-Service, organizations receive expert system and network management services to optimize IT configurations, balance workloads, and ensure high availability across mainframe, on-premise servers, and cloud resources. This consumption-based model smooths costs and aligns capacity with actual demand.

5. Strong Disaster Recovery Solutions

Unplanned outages no longer have to threaten your reputation or bottom line. Managed Disaster Recovery-as-a-Service (DRaaS) leverages geographically dispersed data centers and automated failover orchestration to minimize downtime and data loss. By integrating disaster recovery into your managed mainframe strategy, organizations strengthen their business continuity and reduce recovery costs.

Closing Your IT Talent Gap with Mainframe Services

Bridging the mainframe talent gap isn’t just about plugging resource shortages–it’s about transforming your IT operations into a resilient, cost-effective, and innovation-driven engine for growth. With managed mainframe services, you can:

• Eliminate recruitment headaches and retention risks
• Enhance security posture and compliance readiness
• Boost system performance and uptime
• Align IT costs with actual usage
• Future-proof your infrastructure for cloud, DevOps, and API-driven workflows
  
  

Ready to Learn More?

Download the ISG Report and find out why FNTS has been named a 2025 ISG Leader in both Mainframe-as-a-Service (MFaaS) and Mainframe Operations. When you’re ready to take the next step, contact us to discuss how our managed mainframe solutions can close your talent gap and drive continuous business resilience.