Mainframe Enterprise Services
Mainframe Services
for the Modern Enterprise
Mainframes continue to power the world's most critical workloads — and their role is evolving, not diminishing. Organisations that treat the mainframe as an integral component of a hybrid IT estate — rather than a legacy liability — gain a decisive advantage: the platform's unmatched throughput, security posture, and resilience now coexist with cloud-native tooling, DevOps pipelines, and open APIs. NRB helps you capture that full value, whether you are optimising, modernising, or strategically integrating your mainframe environment.
Speak to an expertService Portfolio
Three pillars. One integrated offering.
Our mainframe services are structured around three complementary service lines — from day-to-day infrastructure management to full-lifecycle modernisation. And because NRB operates equally across mainframe, x86, and public cloud, your transformation strategy never dictates your service provider: wherever your workloads live or move, we cover the full stack from a single contract.
Mainframe as a Service
Hosting & managed operations
- z/OS, z/VM, z/VSE, Linux on Z and iSeries hosting
- End-to-end system management
- Security, compliance & hardening
- Resilience, DR & business continuity
- 24/7 monitoring & alerting
- Performance tuning & capacity planning
- Operations automation
- Production & batch management
- Intelligent dashboarding & reporting
Maintenance & Modernisation
Keeping your applications current and competitive
- Application maintenance & corrective support
- Hybrid integration (mainframe ↔ cloud & web APIs)
- Code modernisation & refactoring
- Modern developer experience tooling
- DevOps integration & CI/CD pipelines
- Testing & quality assurance
- AI-assisted code documentation
- AI-assisted code translation
Digital Transformation Consulting
Strategic guidance for long-term evolution
- Legacy estate assessment & audit
- Application discovery & portfolio analysis
- Transformation roadmap design
- Migration strategy & phasing (rehost, replatform, rearchitect, replace)
- Change management & stakeholder enablement
Use Cases
Proven scenarios across every service line
Explore how NRB applies its expertise in practice — from infrastructure optimisation to application modernisation and strategic transformation.
Safeguarded Copy
Data Protection & RecoveryIBM's Safeguarded Copy creates immutable, isolated point-in-time snapshots of production data volumes — entirely outside the reach of ransomware, operator error, or logical corruption. Unlike traditional backups, these copies are air-gapped at the storage layer and cannot be altered or deleted by any application-layer process.
NRB configures automated Safeguarded Copy schedules aligned to your RPO/RTO requirements, and manages the recovery workflow testing so you can demonstrate recoverability to auditors and regulators on demand.
MSU Optimisation
Cost EngineeringMillion Service Units (MSU) directly drive software licensing costs on z/OS — yet many organisations operate with poorly tuned workload manager (WLM) policies, inefficient batch scheduling, or uncontrolled peak-hour surges that inflate their rolling four-hour peak (R4HA) and, consequently, their sub-capacity software bill.
NRB analyses your WLM configuration, batch topology, and peak consumption patterns, then implements targeted controls — workload capping, off-peak batch migration, and zIIP offload — to reduce your effective MSU consumption without impacting service levels.
OpenTelemetry Integration
Observability & MonitoringMainframe observability has historically meant siloed SMF records and platform-specific tooling invisible to the rest of your organisation's monitoring stack. OpenTelemetry changes that: NRB instruments z/OS workloads to emit standardised traces, metrics, and logs — feeding them directly into your enterprise observability platform (Dynatrace, Datadog, Grafana, or others).
The result is end-to-end distributed tracing that follows a transaction from a mobile front-end, through microservices, all the way into CICS or IMS — giving your SRE and operations teams a single, unified view of the entire application chain.
z/OS Connect
Hybrid Integration & API ExposureDecades of business logic locked inside CICS transactions, IMS programs, or batch services can now be exposed as secure, versioned RESTful APIs — without rewriting a single line of COBOL. IBM z/OS Connect acts as the API gateway layer between your mainframe services and the broader digital ecosystem.
NRB designs and deploys z/OS Connect API definitions, integrates them with your enterprise API management platform (IBM API Connect, AWS API Gateway, Azure APIM), and establishes governance around versioning, rate limiting, and security policies. Mobile apps, cloud microservices, and partner integrations gain instant access to mainframe capabilities — while the core logic stays exactly where it runs best.
Modern Developer Experience
DevOps & Developer ToolingThe talent shortage in mainframe development is real — but it is not solved by migration alone. NRB transforms the mainframe developer experience to attract and retain modern talent: VS Code with IBM Z Open Editor replaces legacy green-screen editors; Git-based source control replaces ISPF-era library management; and automated CI/CD pipelines using IDz, Zowe CLI, and Jenkins or GitHub Actions bring z/OS development in line with distributed development practices.
AI-assisted tooling — including code documentation generation and AI-guided translation from COBOL to modern languages — further accelerates onboarding and reduces the cognitive overhead of legacy codebases. The result: faster release cycles, lower regression rates, and developers who want to work on the mainframe.
Quick Wins Identification
Legacy Assessment & Transformation RoadmapTransformation programmes often stall because the first milestone feels too distant. NRB's Quick Wins Identification engagement reverses that dynamic: in a structured 4–6 week discovery sprint, our architects analyse your application portfolio, infrastructure configuration, and operational practices to surface a prioritised list of improvements that can be implemented within 90 days — with measurable, business-visible outcomes.
Typical quick wins span cost reduction (MSU optimisation, storage reclamation, licence rationalisation), risk reduction (identifying unprotected critical datasets, outdated software levels, backup gaps), and agility improvements (automating manual batch restarts, enabling self-service monitoring dashboards, simplifying change workflows). Each recommendation is scoped, costed, and mapped to the broader transformation roadmap so it moves the programme forward rather than becoming a distraction.
This engagement is particularly valuable as an entry point for organisations that are committed to the mainframe long-term but need to demonstrate early ROI to stakeholders — or for those who have inherited an environment and need a clear, independent baseline before committing to a larger modernisation investment.
Why Mainframe
The right platform
for the right workloads.
Certain workload characteristics make the mainframe the superior choice — not a compromise, but a competitive asset.
Extreme Transaction Volume
Process billions of transactions a day with deterministic throughput — no cloud autoscaling bottlenecks or unpredictable latency spikes.
Enterprise-Grade Security
Hardware-level encryption, multi-factor access, and an architecture designed from inception for regulated environments — finance, government, utilities.
Hybrid Integration Ready
Modern mainframes expose RESTful APIs, support containerised workloads, and integrate natively with your cloud services — no silos, no compromises.
Mission-Critical Resilience
Built-in redundancy, synchronous geo-replication across NRB's two Belgian data centres, and SLAs engineered for zero-downtime operations.
Total Cost Optimisation
Per-transaction costs at scale remain significantly lower than equivalent public cloud deployments, especially for batch-intensive and high-volume workloads.
Stable Long-Term Lifecycle
Applications with decades-long business logic and regulatory requirements benefit from the mainframe's software lifecycle stability — reducing risk and regression overhead.
