If you listen to the folks over at Terminal Talk (http://terminaltalk.net http://terminaltalk.net), they routinely question the wisdom of all those server folks

If you listen to the folks over at Terminal Talk (http://terminaltalk.net http://terminaltalk.net), they routinely question the wisdom of all those server folks having to build out and maintain infrastructure that just comes built-in to the mainframe. And from what I gather a lot of those server folks (or at least their bosses) may be starting to question that now, too. As for Facebook and Google and Netflix and so on, you have to remember that for all their claims of reliability and such, their stuff really only needs to be "good enough". But good enough generally just doesn't cut it when dealing with things like financials and such. BTW, I have a colleague who works for a massive corporation - one that is still recovering from a ransomware attack which has so far cost them at least $300 million. They have thousands of servers, and she says that it has now become IT's full-time job just to keep those updated and patched. (There's apparently little or no time these days for silly little things like development and testing and code loads and such.) I didn't ask her if they are still planning to replace their few remaining mainframes (I'm guessing they're in no big hurry now), but she did tell me that upper management currently thinks that "The Cloud" may yet be their road to salvation.