Make your Move – Unlock mainframe data to get better, faster analytics to insight

Make your Move – Unlock mainframe data to get better, faster analytics to insight

• No longer a massive time and cost headache
• Now faster and easier than ever before
• Migration to cloud not the only option being used successfully

For many years mainframe systems have been the heart and soul of large corporate and government organisations’ data. But getting value from their existing mainframe data has traditionally been a costly and time-consuming exercise.

With digital transformation a hot topic in 2021, many organisations are painfully aware that their technology platforms are not always compatible with the modern, data-driven, analytical business processes they need to implement to stay competitive.

The ability to access all available data to make faster, more accurate decisions has become especially critical during the pandemic and will be into the future. For many organisations, moving data away from legacy mainframe systems has become less of a question of “if”, and more of question of “how”, “when” and “where to”?

IBT’s Qlik Replicate solution makes accessing all your mainframe data fast and easy. Being technology agnostic and with over 45 end points, large organisations have unprecedented options when it comes to unleashing the power of their data.

Time is money and our solution helps our customers save in both respects by getting their data out of mainframe faster – in many cases within a few hours instead of weeks or months.

Alternative Ways to Unlock Your Mainframe Data and Maximise Value

Cloud is often front of mind for many data decision makers. However, organisations are increasingly looking at multiple ways to utilise their mainframe data without placing unnecessary load on precious mainframe resources.

Over the last decade, the cloud environment and streaming platforms, including Data Warehouses (DW’s) and Data Lakes have expanded rapidly and most organisations do not want to tie themselves to one single technology.

Qlik Replicate provides a vendor agnostic approach to the endpoints it supports. So, whether sourcing mainframe data from IBM DB/2, VSAM, IMS, SAP or Oracle, Qlik Replicate will capture the transactions in real-time and with minimal effort. Replicate will then stream the transactions to the platform/s of choice. Whether that be Azure, AWS, Google, Snowflake or one of the myriad of supported targets.

With IBT’s Qlik Replicate solution you can modernise the way you use data. The solution creates data pipelines to both ingest into cloud storage/data warehouse and to stream transaction data in near real-time for internal users inside or external customers. This could also include on-premise Data Warehouses.

Big data users like banks and large government organisations also choose to release data from mainframe for:
1. Streaming to modern platforms and apps (e.g. open banking)
2. On-premise data warehousing
3. Inter-departmental data sharing

Qlik Replicate enables you to access data easily and publish to Apache Kafka, an open-source distributed event streaming platform used by thousands of companies for high-performance data pipelines, streaming analytics, data integration, and mission-critical applications.

Case study: Top 3 Federal Government Department

• Unlocks mainframe data for internal and external stakeholders
• Unleashed data delivers previously unobtainable additional value

Many of IBT’s big data customers are using Qlik Replicate to both populate data warehouses on-premise and for streaming to external parties.

One of our clients, a Federal Government department, had their mainframe data locked up in silos. Whilst they are responsible for the collecting and storing the data, another government department owned the data and required near real-time access to move it to a modern analytics platform for their own use cases.

Until recently, access to near real-time mainframe data of peer government departments has not been available. This was primarily because mainframe data was siloed and there was no effective solution to move it off platform in a secure, timely, and cost-effective way.

Solution deep-dive and results

Our government client is responsible for the delivery of advice and high quality, accessible social, health and child support services and payments.

To modernise reporting and analytical abilities and make use of streaming technologies for business users, the department needed to capture mainframe data and move it to Teradata. They then planned to stream the data to Kafka in real-time for use by both internal stakeholders and other government departments.

Like many government departments, business continuity and security were two key considerations.

For the project to be deemed successful it must:

• Have negligible impact to source business applications; they wanted to ensure that their current division 1 and division 2 processes were not adversely affected during data movement.
• Provide complete visibility on all processes executed as well as audit logging and management.

Results

IBT proposed using Qlik Replicate, a log-based change data capture tool. This means it does not overload the Mainframe source systems to achieve the data replication required by the department.

The Qlik Replicate solution replicates the data from IBM DB2 on zOS and VSAM files on the mainframe to Teradata & Kafka in real-time for downstream processing. This ensured the department could operate business-as-usual and their processes were not impacted.

Being a government department, security was a top priority. Our client required all data at rest to remain on premise which gave them full security control and allowed them to comply with their existing audit and security policies.

The IBT Qlik team were able to ensure the security of this sensitive information during transit from source to target by using native ODBC drivers. No security breaches were reported during the project and all data was migrated securely.

After the success of the initial migration, the Department has entrusted Qlik Replicate with more data migration projects as they continue their digital transformation journey.

The IBT Qlik team are now helping the department migrate their data from other data sources such as SAP HANA, SQL Server, DB2 LUW, Teradata, PostgreSQL & MongoDB.

If you would like to learn more about how Qlik Replicate, or indeed the full QDI platform, can assist you, contact the team at IBT,  Australia’s largest and most experienced QDI partner, for a demonstration or to set up a proof of concept.

Alternatively you can contact the Head of IBT’s Qlik Practice, Jianen Ren, direct: jren@ibt.com.au or call 0458 589 961

Learn More about our award-winning Data Integration and Management Services
IBT Qlik (Attunity) Home page, Projects and Testimonials
IBT Qlik Replicate – universal data replication and ingestion
IBT Qlik Compose – agile data lake and data warehouse automation
IBT Qlik Enterprise – centrally manage your transactional data pipeline
IBT Qlik Gold Client – SAP app. data in real-time for Big Data analytics
IBT Qlik Catalog – on-demand access to analytics-ready data