Whether a state or local government, or a U.S. government agency, a major problem facing government and industry alike is their aging mainframe systems. A shrinking workforce with experience in older languages such as COBOL, limits the ability of organizations to maintain these legacy systems and prepare for the future. This was apparent as states like New Jersey, facing strain on their systems during the early days battling COVID, called for assistance with their COBOL systems.

Now as federal agencies seek new opportunities to introduce efficiencies via artificial intelligence (AI), these systems provide an easy target for modernization. AI with its ability to tackle complex, repetitive tasks accurately provides one solution to the government mainframe modernization challenge. 

To this end, our Karsun Innovation Center experts devoted their time to producing a complete suite of AI solutions dedicated to tackling the mainframe modernization challenge.

The COBOL Modernization Challenge

With their decades-old interconnected applications and systems, these legacy mainframe systems are complex, expensive to maintain, difficult to change, and vulnerable to attacks. At the same time, the cloud presents the opportunity to build secure, resilient systems that adapt to the changing needs of its users.

Past modernization and migration attempts appeared out of reach for these systems. Stymied by both the cost and time required to transform these systems. These high-value assets handling mission-critical workloads present a high stakes challenge for modernization teams. Often core to the business with large customer bases, they have vast complex functionality that must be broken down into smaller parts before proceeding. 

Karsun applied AI, speeding up this tedious task while ensuring modernization teams had a complete map of the legacy system. Using its ReDuX platform, Karsun limited the impact of poorly documented systems and unanticipated relationships between components. When integrated with the other tools available in the ReDuX platform, AI-assisted teams generated production ready code two times faster than when they used humans alone.

Further given this complexity, some organizations may decide to simply replatform the system. But AI gives us the opportunity to do more than lifting and shifting the application to the cloud. It empowers us to optimize with a product mindset. With this in mind we can build human centered systems that scale and adapt to a changing environment.

The Solution: AI for Mainframe Modernization

Enter ReDuX, Karsun’s AI-powered digital transformation platform. We built our platform using AI to accelerate modernization while reducing risk. Using Amazon Bedrock, a platform that provides access to AI tools via an API, Karsun built a comprehensive digital transformation platform. Karsun’s ReDuX provides AI-enhanced tools for modernization team members from designers to developers in a single platform.

Using generative AI, the platform creates a complete blueprint of a legacy system, reducing risk, and generates behavioral insights. Using this information business analysts, designers, and others do more than rewrite these legacy systems, they reimagine an optimized system designed to match the needs of its users.

This product oriented process is enhanced throughout the modernization effort via the platform’s digital transformation agents. Using agentic AI, the modernization team can chat with their code for deeper understanding and apply reusable templates using automations to rapidly scale their work while reducing risk.

ReDux is already in use by the Karsun teams delivering large-scaled complex modernization solutions to our federal agency customers. We recently shared our experience on the AWS Public Sector Blog.  To learn more about AI Solutions for government modernization visit us here: https://karsun-llc.com/solutions/artificial-intelligence-ai-solutions/

Stuck with a difficult modernization challenge? Check out GoReDuX.AI and get unstuck today!