CIOs are again evaluating their mainframe investments, balancing rising operational costs and difficulty finding talent with the perceived costs and risks of moving critical applications to the cloud. Increased business agility, technical innovation, computing elasticity, customer insights, and a growing talent pool all encourage CIOs to migrate and modernize from “Big Iron” onto public cloud platforms. 

Google Cloud recently announced Dual Run, a new mainframe modernization solution, to help customers mitigate the risk involved in mainframe migrations and accelerate their migration to the cloud. Leaders can leverage Dual Run in their quest to ensure their mainframe modernization projects will succeed and pay off so let’s dive a little deeper into what Dual Run is, how it works, and how it can help you. 

Mainframe modernization with a proven technology

Since so many businesses still run mainframes, we decided to partner with Banco Santander—one of the largest banks in the world—to bring Dual Run to our enterprise customers, since they had already built a solution. In fact, Dual Run was built on top of Banco Santander’s unique technology which has already demonstrated proven results in the regulated financial services industry. Now that Dual Run is available, Banco Santander has been using it to bring their data and workloads onto Google Cloud’s trusted infrastructure.

The concept is not new, but the solution is unique

Dual Run enables you to run a parallel production system, allowing you to simultaneously run workloads on your mainframes and on Google Cloud. While many enterprises running mainframes have thought about parallel production concept and a few even tried before, Google Cloud is unique among the hyperscalers to provide such a solution as an offering to its customers. 

With a parallel production run, you can perform real-time testing of your applications on Google Cloud and quickly gather data on performance and stability with no disruption to your business. Once you’re satisfied with the functional and performance equivalence of the two systems, you can make the new Google Cloud environment your system of record, while existing mainframe systems can be used as a backup or decommissioned. 

In addition to the transformative benefits you get from moving to Google Cloud–such as AI-based scalability, speed, and security–migrating mainframes with Dual Run offers you even more benefits:

Mitigate migration risk: Dual Run reduces risk during the migration by running your business critical systems in parallel with powerful reporting to track the difference between your current and target systems. This ensures there is no impact or risk to your existing mainframes while migrating to Google Cloud. 

Secure migration investments: Avoid costly migration mistakes by basing your decisions and actions on empirical data acquired from your production system.

Reduce business testing effort: Compare the functional equivalence of outcomes in the current and target system with production data and drastically reduce the testing cycles of your migrated workload. 

Accelerate migration: Speed up the entire mainframe migration process with a well-defined framework, automation components, predefined dashboards, and a tested approach.  Empirical reporting available in Dual Run also enables customers in regulated industries to more readily respond to regulator reviews and requests for information.

Your migration journey with Dual Run

Dual Run is packaged with several automation components to aid your migration journey, from assessment all the way through to production. 

This chart shows how Dual Run plays a key role throughout your mainframe modernization journey:

Let’s explore this illustration in a bit more detail, phase by phase: 

Current state: This is your starting point, when your production workloads are still running in your mainframe. Dual Run helps you assess your mainframe workload for compatibility on Google Cloud. 

After this assessment, Dual Run’s conversion engine helps address the incompatibilities in your current application and then migrates the application and data to Google Cloud. At this stage, you have your current application executing on the mainframe and your migrated application is ready to be executed or tested on Google Cloud.

Dual Run state: In this state, the migrated workload will be executed in two stages.

Dual Run stage 1:

In the first stage of Dual Run, your mainframe will remain as the “primary” system — meaning the response and outputs to other systems are sent from your mainframe — while the migrated workload will be executed in parallel in Google Cloud as “secondary.”

Dual Run performs the following actions as a cyclical process, repeated until you reach your desired migrated application quality is achieved:

• All workloads — batch & transactions — executed in the mainframe are replicated in Google Cloud 
• The outcomes from both systems are validated to report any differences, enabling you to take corrective actions in migrated applications
• The functional and performance differences between the two systems will be observed, and the mainframe and Google Cloud data are periodically synchronized to bring both the systems in sync 

Typically, most of your migration time will be spent in the first stage of Dual Run until you are satisfied with the results. The key goal for this stage is that your primary, business-critical mainframe workload is not disturbed while your migrated application is tuned to provide the exact same results as your current application.

Dual Run stage 2:

When the Dual Run reporting and results confirm that the migrated application matches your mainframe system, Google Cloud then becomes the “primary” system, while your mainframe will still be executed in parallel as “secondary.” Dual Run will enable you to do a smooth switch between primary and secondary systems through a configuration management system.

Target state: In this final state, the mainframe can be decommissioned while the Dual Run components are removed, enabling an optimal and efficient business execution with Google Cloud.

Summary

For any business or organization that has to migrate or modernize their mainframes, Dual Run offers a unique solution to achieve this with reduced risk and time. In fact, what we’re seeing from our customers is that Dual Run offers the right combination of proven experience, engineering, and strategic partnership that is essential for mainframe migration success. If you would like to learn more, check out our mainframe modernization website.

According to a National Academy of Medicine discussion paper, social determinants of health (SDoH) account for upwards of 80% of a population’s health outcomes. Breaking this down further, 50% come just from socioeconomic and physical environment factors such as education, employment, income, family and social support, community safety, air and water quality, and access to housing and transit. SDoH determine access to and quality of healthcare, and are contributors to a system of disparate access to care.

We believe that to more efficiently provide comprehensive healthcare access to more people, providers will leverage technology to blend in-person and virtual modes of care delivery.

In this article, Amwell and Google Cloud examine five ways telehealth – as part of a provider’s overall care model – can help democratize access to healthcare. (graphic url) 

Remove distance as a barrier to care

8.6 million Americans live more than 30 minutes from their nearest hospital. Long drives can deter patients from seeking care or maintaining routine visits. On the flip side, 92% of Americans nationwide have access to wired broadband in the home or through mobile broadband. Therefore, having a virtual visit just a click away can help remove barriers to care, like distance.

Eliminate the risk of unnecessary exposure

Virtual care means that patients don’t have to worry about potential exposure in transit, while sitting in waiting rooms, or from direct interactions during in-person health visits. This is particularly relevant when it comes to those with chronic diseases or underlying conditions. Telehealth provides patients who may be more susceptible to diseases with access to continuous healthcare without putting them at higher risk for developing more severe symptoms. Virtual visits can occur in the comfort –and safety– of patients’ homes.

Extend access to specialized care

55% of preventable hospitalization or mortality in rural settings is due to lack of access to specialty care. With telehealth, physical proximity to specialized services–typically in urban areas–can be reduced as a limiting factor. Virtual solutions grant everyone access to top specialists, regardless of location.

Save time and money

By augmenting in-person visits with telehealth applications, providers can benefit from greater efficiencies in scheduling, helping to improve their bottom line, and add more flexibility to their workday. Meanwhile, patients can spend less on travel and childcare, limit time taken off work, and save on other costs associated with in-person visits — for a savings of $35 to $690 per visit. In a survey by the COVID-19 Healthcare Coalition, 76% of the 2,000+ patients surveyed across the US responded that transportation was removed as a barrier, 65% reported they no longer had to take time off from work for an appointment, and 67 percent reporting lower costs than an in-person visit.

Combat physician shortage and fatigue

Research shows there will be a shortage of more than 100,000 doctors by 2030. In the midst of a physician shortage, telehealth can help improve care delivery and make it more efficient, ensuring more people can still have their healthcare needs addressed. Additionally, by integrating intelligence such as case triaging along with telehealth into a virtual care model, providers can help reduce clinician burnout.

Amwell and Google Cloud are partnering to deliver transformative telehealth solutions that will make it easier for more patients to receive care and improve patient and clinician experiences across the continuum of care. One example includes embedding real-time captioning and translation services powered by Google Cloud’s AI and NLP technologies within the Amwell platform to increase health access and understanding for more people.

As physicians, we are excited that the future of healthcare will continue to blend cloud technologies like EHR-integrated telehealth platforms, AI, healthcare-trained virtual agents along with in-person care to create an integrated hybrid care model that will improve patient outcomes and unburden providers, all while expanding access to broader patient populations.

To learn more, download the whitepaper “Healthcare’s Virtual Transformation,” written in conjunction with Becker’s Hospital Review.

^{1: “Social Determinants of Health 101 for Health Care: Five Plus Five,” National Academy of Medicine, October 2017}

Cloud engineers face a constant barrage of new cloud services, products, and innovations. By late 2021, Google Cloud alone had released thousands of new features across hundreds of services. Couple this with other technologies and service releases, and it quickly becomes a herculean task for engineers to navigate, consume, and stay current on the ever changing technology landscape. We have heard from engineers this often leads to anxiety and frustration as engineers struggle to keep up. They are faced with a plethora of training options but often lack the time and funding. 

Google Cloud has reinvigorated technical training to make it more informative and applicable to public sector customers and partners. We aim to maximize your training experience so you can get targeted training when you need it. The Google Cloud Public Sector Technical Learning Series addresses customer feedback and provides fun and practical training. Sessions are currently running every two weeks. 

“Short and sweet” technical topics geared to subjects you care about

Generic training doesn’t always resonate with public sector technologists. Our new curriculum targets specific public sector use cases, is delivered by customer engineers, and can be accomplished in less than two hours.  This means participants can apply the learnings directly to real-life challenges quickly. 

Easy to find, easy to enroll 

Training opportunities should always be at your fingertips. Our automated training platform will ensure that you only need to enroll once. The system will automatically notify you of upcoming sessions so you can plan in advance and at your convenience. Sessions will be offered on a recurring basis to meet the needs of your organization.

Fun and engaging

Typical training sessions often include a sea of glazed eyes, unresponsive to basic prompts, falling asleep at our desks, we have all been there. But it doesn’t have to be this way. Our goal is to infuse Google culture into our training through interactive exchanges and tangible rewards to keep participants inspired and engaged.

Traditional technology training doesn’t always help you navigate the nuts and bolts of how to effectively introduce a product into an organization. But we know that technology doesn’t operate in isolation; it supports and becomes part of a living organism, managed by humans and confined by other components of an organization’s structure (e.g. existing systems or decentralized business units). 

Part of a larger community of like-minded engineers

Learning with – and from – a community of peers is one way to overcome the challenges and complexities of applying new technology within a complex organization. We created the Public Sector Connect community for this very reason. It is one example of how we surface best practices for public sector innovators. During weekly “Coffee Hours” and working sessions, our community members share their journey and lessons learned with each other. We know that innovation evolves through iteration and diverse perspectives, and Public Sector Connect is committed to helping surface critical challenges and solutions, and connecting those who are solving similar problems. Join the community today.