How workload automation supports digital transformation
This article is about workload automation and how although you may already have it, not all workload automation is equal.
We often see companies acquire lots of technologies that support workload automation, and they vary in what they can provide to the business. You may have workload automation, but do you have what is needed to serve a digital business?
We struggle to find any company today which is not on a digital transformation journey of some form. Businesses must react in the right way to customers and suppliers. The right sort of automation is critical to your success. Digital business automation software solutions are born out of digital transformation, and it highlights that the workload automation of yesterday is not suitable to allow us to succeed in a digital world. You need to incorporate new technologies into existing business processes regardless of their delivery model. Interestingly this highlights that workload automation is still critical. Many people feel that being more digital reduces the need for workload automation, however, from our experiences the complete opposite is true. What you actually need is better workload automation.
A hybrid digital infrastructure contains on-premise operations as well as multiple cloud solutions, so you must manage these in a single location. Having multiple Islands of Automation looking after pieces of the pie is a recipe for failure. Digitalization adds new things like big data, it must be incorporated at speed to give analytics and must be connected to applications that you no longer control directly. They can only be consumed through SaaS. At the same time, you need to support the increased speed and growth the company is expecting from this investment in the digital transformation program.
The business processes you run today are already complex, as we progress through digital transformation, these processes don’t get any easier. They get more complicated because they operate in a far more distributed way. Less is under the control of the bricks and mortar data centers and there are far more links between applications running in different locations and under different operating models that control the critical business processes.
In the past you only needed to run a series of jobs or scripts on machines that are ultimately under your control, in the digital world, you still have much of that same workload, but you need to interconnect it with the workload running in places where you simply cannot run a command or a script and these connections need to be hardened. We cannot simply rely on running an API and hope for the best, we need to know when that workload completes, what was the business outcome of that action and be able to instantly continue to the next steps regardless of where they may be executing.
We all have acquired a lot of tools to execute these jobs as we have done this for as long as companies have relied on computers running their business. This means that most companies have a lot of technologies providing the service. Forester highlighted many years ago that companies can be relying on 4 – 10 scheduling technologies to complete the number 1 business process. EMA highlighted that over half of the enterprises are using point solutions for these tasks. The same survey showed that 42% of them struggle to reach modern technologies used in digital transformation. Over a third of these realized, sometimes too late, that workload automation technologies they relied on in the past are not suitable as they move forward. Often having a significant impact on the digital transformation journeys and many of them admitted to not having a central enterprise-wide visualization or control of this workload, which will have an impact on operations and the business.
The status quo has consequences, the fragile handoffs between processing or in many cases the manual control by people increases the error rate but also the operational cost. This is also not able to scale which is a critical outcome of digital transformation. A lack of visibility and control, makes any change take longer. These fragile interconnections mean that when we need to make a change, we adopt it much slower, we need to do far more testing to try to make sure we have not had an operational impact on upstream or downstream processing across our business. Without that central control but importantly, without centralized audit, we increase the security compliance risk across the company
Broadcom’s enterprise workload automation lets you regain control over your business processes. It extends the reach of automation to all the technologies you need to adopt for your digital transformation and ultimately allows IT operations to provide better service to your business. Covering your historic applications with deep integrations into the commercial off-the-shelf ERP technologies both on-premises and in the cloud as well as all the latest technologies and applications either traditionally installed or in a software as a service world. It becomes a one-stop shop for all things automation across the business. Allowing you to automate the most complex business processes from end to end, across your data centres, your ERP systems, and your multi-cloud environments. Delivering a business automation software service that helps deliver your successful digital transformation.
