State Workforce Development Agency Midwest state keeps benefits coming despite historic unemployment Challenge This midwestern state usually processes around 3,000 unemployment claims a week. Then the COVID-19 pandemic hit. In the first week after expanding benefits, the state received around 41,000 claims—a more than 11-fold increase over their typical load. Many states’ mission-critical systems were hobbled by similar rates of increase at around the same time. But because this state’s unemployment applications are processed using an IBM Z mainframe, IT was able to instantly scale up its total capacity on demand by nearly two- thirds without purchasing any new hardware or software. Results IBM reports that a single z15® mainframe is capable of processing 2.5 billion transac

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