Workload automation evolution

As global enterprises increasingly adopt a digital business strategy, automation technologies are playing a key role in driving the underpinning digital processes. Technologies such as IOT and robotics are being joined by cobots, virtual reality and AI-enabled decision-making, underpinned by big data systems. These are all designed to enable enhanced customer experience, speed to market and productivity. It is critical that business and IT processes are improved to meet the demands of ‘digital’ to ensure the full value and benefits can be realised.

Process automation requirements are increasing at an accelerated rate, applying pressure to ensure that your software solution will deliver on its promise to deliver the flexibility, agility and technology support, for instance, cloud, that the digital business operation requires.

Surveys conducted through various analyst and research groups report a clear indication that 60% of enterprises will have made and matured their investments in automation, orchestration and development life cycle management for cloud native and hybrid applications and platforms by 2022.

We take a quick look into some of the critical aspects of ensuring you have an automation solution that is transforming the way your current workloads and workflows are automated and orchestrated, either on an on-premises, multicloud or commonly required hybrid platform, to deliver your mission-critical applications and business services at an unprecedented rate, without hampering quality while driving your enterprise's strategic automation closer to Industry 4.0 transformations.

1. Keeping your head in the cloud – As we move towards a cloud-centric operating model, it has become essential to ensure automating and orchestrating workflows across hybrid and multicloud environments from a centralised point of control is an essential piece of armoury in any workload automation solution, where organisations can leverage the extensibility and scalability of their cloud ecosystems.
2. DevOps giving rise to DataOps – Incorporating workload orchestration within your DevOps life cycle has and will always be a critical aspect to development of application workflows to reduce costs while improving the quality of development jobs through continuous integration (the practice of integrating new code into shared repositories in order to build, test and release applications at the click of a button. The advantage is identifying bugs early and resolving this in the beginning stage of the development life cycle. This leads enterprises into scaling and simplifying their data pipelines from ingestion, processing all the way to analytics while maintaining a complete 360-degree view of their data pipelines as it progresses through each stage.
3. What you can’t see will hurt you – Visibility has become a critical aspect in ensuring organisations are being provided with the correct data in real-time manner, giving organisations the ability to identify and resolve issues rapidly or before they even happen. Having access to the right historical data at a click of a button ensures auditing is simplified and your organisation meets its compliance regulations with ease. By having an intuitive and clear graphical interface that provides you with a complete view of all jobs and services with built-in automated alerts and predictive SLA triggers is paramount for any IT and business operational organisation.
4. Empowering self-service – Decentralising the creation and visibility of an organisation application workflow solution allows business users to control, manage and resolve their own jobs without placing additional burden on IT technical staff, allowing them to concentrate on critical IT operational activities. Business users now have the potential to accelerate their decision-making process with access to the right data at the right time through intuitive analytical reports.
5. Critical movement of files – Intelligent file transfer capabilities that can be easily integrated into your existing workflows that can be monitored from a central interface, giving a complete end-to-end automated and orchestrated solution that is event-driven and provides complete visibility and management of the integration of file transfers with all your applications. Dependency mapping of all jobs that are impacted by a file transfer is critical in today’s workload requirements for organisations to ensure business services are delivered on time.
6. No integration, no operation – A critical survival component of any workload automation solution is the ability to integrate into various new and legacy systems to design critical application service jobs to deliver an organisation’s application and business service requirements at an accelerated rate. Creating consistency across the development, test and production environments is a key capability, giving an organisation's developers the ability to embed their workflow automation during the application development life cycle. Applications can now be delivered in more reliable approach, with errors being diagnosed and resolved in a rapid manner. Consideration of incorporating the need for orchestrating in ephemeral environments is an important factor for any containerisation strategy that organisations are embarking on, to orchestrate workflows dynamically, allowing organisations to run what they need when they need it.

Workload automation and orchestration has evolved as a critical tool that all organisations should include in their current automation roadmap. Organisations of all industries ultimately want to ensure their business and IT processes are optimally executed with accelerated times of delivery, without comprising on quality and downtime for their digital applications. Ability to develop, execute and monitor all application workflows is a necessity in an IT and business world of complex distributed applications. Automating job scheduling and application deployment is and will be an integral component in every organisation’s digital strategy as we move more into the new digital era. 

If you enjoyed this article, and would like to learn more about workload automation, join our webinar on 24 June: