Efficiently accomplishing day-to-day operations is essential to the way organizations find success. When these processes became complex and messy, organizations looked to batch processing. Business operations that were run through batch processes were time-based, stable jobs, supported by reliable, steady custom scripts. As long as business requirements stayed the same, batch jobs were usable for years. Batch processing provided a simple way to manage workloads and tools. However, with the extensive amount of external applications and technologies existing today, batch processing is simply not broad enough to overcome the challenges that IT teams face in 2016.
We are living in a fast-paced, ever-changing and evolving business world; developers are constantly building and releasing new software, organizations are working overtime to find new ways to satisfy consumer needs and desires, and more and more disparate devices and technologies are connecting to each other every day. The pace of business is continuously accelerating, and IT is constantly adjusting to stay synchronous with the changes.
Unlike the batch processes running twenty or thirty years ago, today’s operations are:
- Triggered, not time-based
- Ever-changing, not stable
- Unsound, not always reliable
Due to the changes in daily operations, more and more organizations are turning to workload automation to improve agility and accelerate the execution of jobs and workflows. With workload automation, organizations are able to more reliably execute jobs, reduce demand on limited IT skills, improve reporting and alerting, and more quickly deploy new business processes.
Workload automation helps organizations shrink the IT Resources Gap by reducing the need for specialized skills in the IT department. Automation allows IT teams to do more with less. Many best practices have been identified and developed within workload automation such as: code reuse, streamlined installation, a focus on architecture, workload automation deployed early and often, version control & software management practices, and event based workflow execution. These best practices should be considered in order to maximize results and benefits of workload automation.
This is just a brief review of the ways businesses can benefit from IT automation. To read more about the composition of a workload automation solution and the history of batch processing, download the free eBook: Best Practices for Workload Automation in the Bimodal Era.
