Job scheduling and workload automation for the modern workplace
Workload automation supports cross-platform process orchestration and has evolved the role of job schedulers. Find out if it’s time to implement these key functions in your organization.
Job scheduling and workload automation solutions were designed for different goals, but they’re closely related and share some functionality. When combined, they can provide powerful orchestration from a single point of control.
Job scheduling: A must-have for modern business use cases
What is job scheduling?
Job scheduling is the process of executing tasks at a scheduled time or when a specific event occurs. Job scheduling tools automate tasks, eliminating the need for manual kickoffs and giving IT more time to spend on higher-value projects and reducing delays.
Traditional job scheduling tools were developed to automate batch jobs that ran on homogeneous mainframes from vendors like IBM and Oracle. This legacy continues today, with native job schedulers automating tasks for specific applications or platforms (for example, Microsoft Windows Task Scheduler).
The number of disparate tools and operating systems used by IT teams has grown in recent decades, with many IT teams managing complex, on-premises and hybrid cloud environments. As more organizations moved into the cloud and used AWS, Azure and other SaaS applications, automation initiatives became more complex, and the need to be scalable also became more important.
Benefits of an IT job scheduler
An IT job scheduler provides numerous benefits to organizations by automating the execution of repetitive tasks. These include:
- Better resource utilization: Intelligent scheduling ensures that resources are optimally allocated, avoiding bottlenecks and delays.
- Cost savings: By reducing reliance on manual interventions and optimizing resource use, organizations can lower operational costs over time.
- Enhanced scalability: Modern job schedulers integrate seamlessly with hybrid environments and various platforms, supporting the demands of growing organizations.
- Improved compliance: Built-in reporting features make it easier to adhere to industry regulations and standards by providing visibility into scheduled jobs and their execution history.
- Increased efficiency: Automating critical processes saves IT teams hours of time, allowing them to focus on strategic initiatives rather than routine operational tasks.
- Reduced errors: Automation minimizes human error by ensuring tasks are executed consistently and according to predefined rules or triggers.
Challenges of traditional job schedulers
While traditional job schedulers provide a foundation for automating repetitive tasks, they often fall short in today’s complex IT environments. Organizations relying solely on these tools may encounter several challenges.
Traditional schedulers were designed for simpler, on-premises environments and often struggle to accommodate hybrid or multi-cloud architectures. They operate in isolation, managing tasks for specific applications or platforms. This lack of cross-platform integration makes it difficult to coordinate workflows across diverse systems, leading to inefficiencies and data silos.
Many traditional tools also rely on custom scripts for task automation, which are time-consuming to create but also require ongoing maintenance as systems or requirements change.
Without centralized monitoring or dashboards, tracking the status of jobs across systems can be tedious. Legacy schedulers can lack this transparency and intelligent resource management.
These challenges underscore the limitations of legacy tools and highlight the need for solutions that can streamline processes, scale with organizational growth and support the needs of modern IT teams.
Modern job scheduling vendors provide pre-built integrations with numerous applications and systems to support the orchestration of cross-platform batch processing — which is where workload automation steps in.
Workload automation: Like job scheduling but more flexible
What is workload automation?
Workload automation (WLA) solutions are used to manage data and dependencies across disparate tools such as managed file transfer/ETL automation tools, business process applications, enterprise resource planning (ERP) tools, BI platforms and more.
WLA solutions often provide universal connectors and/or powerful REST API adapters that allow the integration of virtually any tool into an end-to-end process without the need for custom scripts.
What workload automation does best
WLA addresses the challenges that traditional job schedulers often fail to solve. With its advanced capabilities and flexible architecture, WLA excels in several critical areas.
It enables seamless coordination across applications, platforms and environments. It ensures that interconnected processes flow smoothly, even when dependencies span multiple systems or hybrid clouds.
Unlike traditional schedulers that rely on static time-based triggers, WLA supports dynamic, event-driven automation. This ensures processes can react in real time to business events, system alerts or data changes.
By analyzing historical and real-time data, WLA tools optimize resource usage so that workloads are distributed effectively to avoid bottlenecks and underutilization. WLA can also support regulatory requirements by maintaining detailed logs and providing built-in reporting to help organizations stay audit-ready and maintain data integrity.
The evolution of enterprise workload automation
As you strive to adapt to increasingly complex IT environments, you may find traditional job schedulers fall short of meeting the demands of your modern workflows. WLA tools are evolving to do just that.
In the 2024 Gartner® Magic Quadrant™ for Service Orchestration and Automation Platforms (SOAPs) report, industry analysts note that SOAPs “deliver capabilities enabling organizations to manage workloads, workflows, resource provisioning and data pipelines across their technology landscapes.”
Enterprise workload automation software designed for process orchestration can include a range of capabilities that simplify IT automation, including:
- Workload scheduling and management
- Batch monitoring and alerting
- Service-level agreement (SLA) management
- Process mapping
- Change management
- Resource provisioning
- And more
These capabilities, when paired with REST API adapters and monitoring dashboards, allow IT to streamline real-time data processes and simplify regulatory compliance across automated environments. They also make automation more scalable and empower both IT and business users to create and run automation initiatives across the organization. Ongoing optimization is also easier, as all the data and trends are easily monitored in a powerful dashboard.
Powerful job scheduling with workload automation
WLA solutions support job scheduling, but most job schedulers do not support WLA. For example, WLA includes load balancing to ensure resources have enough CPUs to complete jobs. Job scheduling tools often do not.
In addition to time-based triggers, WLA solutions also support event-driven automation, job constraints and variables to pass data to downstream scheduled jobs.
As IT environments become increasingly complex and the need for rapid integrations and real-time data grows, the basic capabilities of traditional job schedulers (and other point solutions such as cron jobs or custom scripts) are no longer sufficient to meet business needs. As a result, IT teams are implementing WLA solutions to automate, monitor and orchestrate cross-platform processes without having to rely on custom scripts or multiple scheduling solutions.
For example, SThree, a leading international staffing company, once relied on Microsoft Windows Task Scheduler as its sole automation tool until its global expansion made for an increasingly complex IT environment. This prompted calls for WLA and enterprise job scheduling software to automate manual, script-driven processes and manage dependencies between diverse business applications with flexible scheduling options that could orchestrate workloads across time zones.
Read more about how SThree’s team automated its manual provisioning requests.
Trends in workload automation and job scheduling
Customer expectations are rapidly changing. To stay ahead, IT teams must be able to integrate and capitalize on new technologies rapidly.
The move toward WLA and away from traditional job scheduling software is a direct result of these latest trends. The need for simplistic task automation, completed in homogeneous silos, has given way to complex business and IT processes that have to be orchestrated across hybrid and multi-cloud environments.
For this reason, industry analysts expect basic IT process automation to evolve into broader automation strategies that centralize the control of automation across silos.
According to the 2024 Gartner Critical Capabilities for SOAPs report, by 2027, “90% of organizations currently delivering workload automation will be using SOAPs to orchestrate workloads and data pipelines in hybrid environments across IT and business domains.”
This becomes especially important in the areas of DevOps and big data/Hadoop automation, as businesses rely on real-time data management to optimize customer experiences and make faster business decisions.
Managing resources across virtual and cloud environments has also become an issue for many IT operations teams since cloud costs can quickly spiral out of control.
In order to better meet these needs, Gartner has identified a trend toward IT automation platforms that unify workload and infrastructure automation. They’ve found that organizations are using business process automation and workload automation tools that readily integrate with virtually all applications, systems and technologies, allowing IT to orchestrate processes and resources across the data center, IT infrastructure and business systems.
As new technologies and the need for data-driven solutions accelerate the pace of digital transformation, organizations will continue to move toward WLA solutions that centralize and coordinate the automation of enterprise applications.
Job scheduling software capabilities
There are a number of WLA solutions out there. But what orchestration and scheduling features should you be seeking? Here, we’ll provide an overview.
Drag-and-drop workflow designer
Look for pre-built job steps and templates for commonly scripted actions that users can assemble into end-to-end workflows, making it easier to manage dependencies between technologies operating systems (iOS, Linux, etc.) and applications. Ideally, your solution will include integrations for third-party applications, databases and platforms, plus a web services API and powerful REST API adapter to build integrations for virtually any tool or technology.
Flexible date/time scheduling
Top WLA tools incorporate granular date- and time-based scheduling (calendars, fiscal year dates, time zones, custom tags, etc.) and support scheduling workflow orchestrations based on the custom business day.
Monitoring and alerting
Customizable alerts are a must so you can be sure the appropriate parties or systems are notified when a specified condition has been raised within a workflow.
Monitoring and alerting for workflows should also be tied to SLAs or business policies. End-users should be able to set warning and critical thresholds (based on absolute and relative deadlines or problematic metrics) and establish customized alert notifications and automated remediation actions for an impending SLA breach. An intuitive user interface and dashboard are helpful for easily visualizing complex workflows when manual monitoring is required.
Resource provisioning
IT needs to provision virtual/cloud machines on the fly to meet dynamic workload demands in real time. Your WLA solution needs to analyze historical and real-time data to anticipate resource demands, intelligently distributing queues to minimize slack time and reduce idle machine resources.
Self-service business automation
Some WLA software tools provide an intuitive user interface that allows help desk and business team members to execute daily and ad-hoc processes and promote better workload management. IT sets up the backend environment and empowers various business units to run and monitor specific jobs and plans based on departmental or individual requirements. This allows business users to run and monitor processes as needed, such as provisioning virtual machines or producing end-of-day reports, without waiting for IT.
ActiveBatch by Redwood has all of the above features and more. Schedule a demo to learn what it can do to elevate your job scheduling.
Job scheduling and workload automation FAQs
IT teams commonly use a mix of tools, including cron jobs, Microsoft Windows Task Scheduler and application-specific schedulers. However, as IT environments become more complex, many organizations transition to enterprise-grade solutions like workload automation platforms, which provide centralized control and integration across diverse systems.
See Windows Task Scheduler alternatives.
A job scheduling tool automates task execution based on predefined criteria, such as specific dates, times or events. These tools streamline operations by ensuring tasks run consistently and on time without manual intervention. Key benefits of job scheduling solutions include reduced delays, enhanced efficiency and improved compliance.
Learn more about key features of enterprise job scheduling platforms.
Workload automation (WLA) goes beyond traditional job scheduling by offering integration across platforms, applications and hybrid environments. WLA manages complex dependencies and orchestrates tasks in real time, making it a critical tool for modern IT teams.
Key benefits of WLA include:
– Managing dependencies across tools like ERP systems and data pipelines.
– Enabling real-time data workflows.
– Scaling automation initiatives across the enterprise.
– Supporting advanced capabilities like SLA monitoring and resource provisioning.
Explore the power of workload automation for driving IT efficiency and scalability.
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