The future of workload automation management
In IT management, there’s only one constant: change. As organizations have shifted digital workloads to deploy on cloud platforms and organizations implement more advanced automation, traditional workload automation platforms are evolving.
The evolution of workload automation solutions
What we now know as workload automation software evolved from traditional job schedulers, but some current workload automation tools still have the same limits as legacy job scheduling software and batch processes.
In 2023, Gartner found that traditional workload automation (WLA) strategies simply could not cope with the increasingly complex workload types, volumes and enterprise applications of evolving business demands. As companies implemented hybrid cloud, on-premises and multi-cloud environments, the limited capabilities and lack of agility of WLA solutions meant they couldn’t keep up.
The future of automation is Service Orchestration and Automation Platforms (SOAPs)
The 2024 Gartner® Magic Quadrant™ for SOAPs report predicts that “by 2027, 90% of organizations currently delivering workload automation will be using service orchestration and automation platforms (SOAPs) to orchestrate workloads and data pipelines in hybrid environments across IT and business domains.”
SOAPs easily adapt to data pipelines, application architectures and cloud-native infrastructure. Add in that SOAPs seamlessly integrate with DevOps toolchains, and organizations have the operational efficiency, standardized processes and cost savings they need.
Here’s a look at how SOAPs will revolutionize process automation and digital transformation across a variety of use cases.
Event-driven automation
Speed up the progress of your workflows in your IT environment and have it respond to events in real time. Event-driven automation enables intelligent automation that triggers processes to begin once a specific action occurs. For example, an event could be when data or files are available to transfer. This reduces time-based dependencies and human intervention, freeing teams to focus on strategic work. Event-driven automation also makes real-time workflow monitoring and alerting more valuable as IT teams can track the health and performance of their automated processes.
Event-driven orchestration helps teams deliver accurate real-time results to business teams faster than ever so your organization can make better decisions.
End-to-end workflow orchestration
SOAPs enable IT operations teams to easily automate and streamline IT processes across on-premises, cloud and hybrid environments. Teams can enable process automation via APIs, open-source apps, web services and containers. This flexibility supports the fulfillment of service-level agreements (SLAs); teams can even receive notifications when SLAs are in danger of not being met. Other teams across the enterprise benefit, too. DevOps can leverage custom workflows and automation services/microservices with native SOA APIs and formats. And any business user who engages an ERP, CRM, finance tool or big data (Hadoop) pipeline will benefit from the streamlined data processing.
Smarter resource provisioning
As teams deploy more workloads to the cloud, automated provisioning with a SOAP can spin up servers on demand. With centralized control of cloud computing, resource provisioning and data, IT teams can automate provisioning to optimize operational efficiency and enable scalability.
Self-service for business and IT teams
Self-service options empower business users across the enterprise to run, monitor and request automated workflows through self-service native web forms and email processing. SOAPs offer consumable automation services, enabling users to publish any automated business process as interactive web service endpoints for user-friendly integration.
Better data management
SOAPs enable IT automation across disparate, cross-platform data sources. They also empower teams to orchestrate the data lifecycle through ingestion, transformation and storage pipelines as real-time streams, batched transactions or managed file transfer.
This makes it easier for teams to coordinate resource management applications, automate virtualization and run ETL testing and database tasks.
Single point of control for strong data security
Unlike traditional scheduling tools, SOAPs create a centralized platform for workflow automation, batch jobs and automating business applications. So not only can teams control processes and policies from one place, but they can also easily establish comprehensive audit trails for all processes and user activity. That means stronger, easier enforcement of business rules across the entire enterprise.
SaaS simplification
Reduce your infrastructure costs with a Software-as-a-Service (SaaS) automation solution. Solutions like RunMyJobs by Redwood provide fully-hosted infrastructure that eliminates complexity and the endless maintenance lifecycle that on-premises automation infrastructure demands.
SaaS SOAPs also offer advantages like connectors that don’t require additional licensing and straightforward pricing that scales with the number of jobs you run.
As workload automation management evolves, so must businesses in order to maintain their competitive edge. Demo RunMyJobs to discover what’s possible with a flexible, easy-to-use workload automation platform delivered by Redwood, a 2024 Gartner® Magic Quadrant™ for SOAPs Leader.
Magic Quadrant is a trademark of Gartner, Inc. and/or its affiliates.
