Mainframes Or Cloud: What To Choose?

Computing has become a crucial part in different domains of organizations and businesses to effectively pursue the business operations. While up till the intermediate level of computing and data processing, which can be effectively performed with traditional computer systems, advance computing needed advanced technology for processing. This advanced computing and bulk data processing was made possible with mainframe computers.

Mainframes are capable of accommodating large volume of data and process it with high hardware and computational configuration. Mainframes get their advanced computational capabilities with advanced architecture and redundant internal engineering of various modules. With introduction of new technology like cloud computing, grid computing mainframe systems soon became a thing of the past.

New technologies are producing faster and accurate results that made them a better choice over the traditional computing methodologies. Another reason of acceptance of new technologies is their similarity in features with that of mainframes. Similarity in Client-server model, in which the technologies are based on a request-reply method deployed in a client-server model. In both the technologies i.e. cloud & mainframes, a user called as the client, requests for the service from a central serving node(in client's perspective) called as server. In return, a server either accepts the requests, halts it or rejects it according to the availability of resources.

Despite of the similarities, there exists a number of differences which ask for the consent of the business to choose the technology based upon a number of parameters. Some parameters to keep in mind while choosing the type of computing technology are:

• Server location: The facility location of the server matters to organizations which work upon confidential and extremely sensitive data. In such cases mainframes can be included in practice, whereas in case of cloud services, everything is remotely located and is accessed using internet. In order to build a facility, the cost of installation and maintenance rises which eventually increases the cost of operations.
• Security: Since mainframes reside inside the campus of the organization, only authorized users can access the network. In mainframes, intruders cannot even sniff the packets of the data, while in cloud, there is a risk of security being compromised as the mode of accessing the cloud is through internet. This also increases the dependency on the internet for using any resource.
• Reliability: Mainframe systems are more reliable as compared to cloud services since there are pre-defined number of users in mainframe systems as compared to cloud, where number of users is dynamic. Secondly even if the network goes down in mainframe, the problem can be located in less time as the server is localized while it is de-localized in cloud services.

Mainframes imparts 100% control over the data of the company, while using cloud makes it a little bit suspicious. However, cloud computing companies have their own set of policies which ensures the safety of customer's data. In comparison with mainframes, cloud services are more flexible in nature, client can upgrade or downgrade the service according to the requirements. Moreover, support for mobile devices is also provided in cloud services while mainframes do not support mobile devices.