Heirloom Computing

Accelerating Mainframe Modernization to Sovereign Clouds – Part 1

The Sovereign Cloud Business Case — Gary Crook, CEO

Introduction

In today’s rapidly evolving digital landscape, organizations face increasing pressure to modernize legacy mainframe applications while maintaining data sovereignty and security. As European businesses particularly seek compliant cloud solutions, Heirloom Computing is leading the charge in enabling rapid, low-risk migrations to sovereign cloud platforms like STACKIT.

The Sovereign Cloud Imperative

The shift toward sovereign clouds represents more than a technical preference—it’s becoming a business necessity for many European organizations.

These purpose-built environments offer several compelling advantages:

1. Data Residency Compliance: Ensures data remains within specific geographic boundaries, satisfying increasingly stringent regulatory requirements.
2. Reduced Dependencies: Minimizes reliance on hyperscaler technologies that may be subject to extraterritorial laws.
3. Enhanced Security Posture: Provides dedicated security frameworks aligned with local compliance standards.
4. Operational Autonomy: Delivers greater control over infrastructure, reducing vulnerability to foreign policy changes.
5. Cost-Effective Sustainable Digital Infrastructure: Often built with regional environmental priorities in mind.’

However, the journey to these sovereign environments has traditionally been hampered by the complexity of legacy applications, particularly those running on mainframes. This is where Heirloom’s market-leading migration solution creates transformative opportunities.

Bridging Mainframes to Sovereign Clouds

Heirloom’s platform offers a uniquely powerful approach: delivering on replatforming and refactoring outcomes simultaneously.

This dramatically decreases risk by putting clients in control of their modernization projects, allowing them to utilize the best available resources based on their specific requirements.

Heirloom automates the transformation of legacy COBOL and PL/1 applications into cloud-native Java implementations without changing business logic. This approach accelerates the migration process while preserving the functional integrity of mission-critical systems.

The key advantages of Heirloom’s approach include:

1. Controlled Modernization: The freedom to choose your own path at a pace that is optimal for your organization.
2. Fast & Accurate Migration: Reduces risk and collapses project timelines from years to months.
3. Preserved Business Logic: Maintains the exact behavior and functional equivalence of the original applications.
4. Lower Costs: Cuts OpEx by 60-85%.
5. Cloud-Native Architecture: Creation of agile applications that are performant, scalable, and resilient.

Real Customers. Real Results.

Heirloom’s track record of delivering large-scale, complex mainframe modernization projects is unmatched.

In this case study from Finland, written by the client themselves, the application was built from 22M lines of code:

https://www.arek.fi/blog/from-mainframe-to-cloud-from-cobol-to-java-pension-calculation-becomes-more-efficient-and-cost-effective

A highlight from the case study:

“This is truly an exceptionally large and successful project, unique in Finland’s scale. Such projects have not been seen many times elsewhere in the world either.” — Aleksi Anttila, Technology Manager, Arek Oy

And a testimonial from the CIO:

“Given the size and complexity of the processing, we were astonished that the replatformed system was processing requests within 3 months of the project start date.” — Satu Koskinen, CIO, Arek Oy

The End State: Service-Agnostic Applications

Migrating a mainframe workload to the STACKIT sovereign cloud platform, delivers several key improvements:

1. Modern Architecture: Deployed as a Java application to the Apache Tomcat application server running on a scalable Cloud Foundry infrastructure.
2. Database Modernization: VSAM datasets migrated to a high-performance and fully-managed PostgreSQL database, making the data instantly accessible via standard SQL.
3. Platform Independence: The Java-based implementation can run on any cloud platform, eliminating vendor lock-in.
4. DevOps Integration: Continuous deployment pipelines enable rapid feature delivery and security updates.
5. Enhanced Monitoring: Real-time performance monitoring and predictive analytics improve system reliability.
6. Data Sovereignty: All processing and data storage now occur within the STACKIT sovereign cloud environment, ensuring compliance with European data protection regulations.

The Path Forward: Embracing Sovereign Cloud Transformation

As organizations across Europe face increasing pressure to modernize legacy systems while maintaining data sovereignty, Heirloom’s unique approach and technology offer a proven pathway to success.

By dramatically accelerating the migration of mainframe applications to sovereign clouds like STACKIT, we’re enabling businesses to:

– Achieve compliance with evolving regulations
– Reduce operational costs and technical debt
– improve agility and time-to-market
– Enhance security posture and risk management
– Preserve decades of business logic investment

For organizations still relying on mainframe technology, the message is clear: rapid, low-risk migration to sovereign clouds is not just possible—it’s now a strategic imperative for maintaining competitive advantage in an increasingly regulated digital landscape.

Part 2

The second part of this article covers the technical implementation details for migrating the open-source AWS Card application to STACKIT’s sovereign cloud platform, including Cloud Foundry configuration, deployment steps, and a live application demonstration.