Mainframe operators, themselves, are dying off like dinosaurs because everyone went on this cloud kick and yet the cloud is, IMO, just as vulnerable. Stripping away all the jargon and bullsh— techies love to babble, a mainframe requires sunk costs in a physical system that must be constantly updated and is vulnerable because it exists in one physical location. A cloud requires paying to outsource this to another company and is vulnerable because the business must access their important data through an internet connection that isn’t (and probably never will be) 100% secure from hackers and terrorists.
I guess enough businesses have been stung by the cloud that they are rebuilding their mainframes again which, at least, the business has more physical control and access over their data.
The wisest approach, which I have seen in action, is a redundancy approach where data centers exist in more than one location and the cloud is used as a backup storage location as part of a disaster recovery plan, meaning you have a mainframe that does the primary work, a second physical mainframe in another city that can take over for the primary during maintenance and physical emergencies (hurricanes, for example) and a third backup of data in a cloud system should both mainframes be affected at one time.
This triple redundancy is expensive but it is the wisest approach for any business where their data is their lifeblood.
I agree. When I worked for the insurance company, we had the first two (this was waaaay before cloud architecture).
The disaster recovery plan required daily interim and weekly full backups of the system to be made and transported to a cave at a distant location.
Every six months, we practiced disaster recovery, and I participated. We'd travel to the remote site where the second physical mainframe was located, and were required to get those backups out of the cave and have the entire system restored, tested, and fully running (i.e., "paying" claims) within three days of the disaster. It was kind of cool to do. Lots of coffee.