Partner Article

Five trends to transform workload automation in 2013

Ben Rosenberg, President and founder of Advanced Systems Concepts Inc, looks ahead to 2013 and the trends that will transform workload automation.

When automobile traffic begins to snarl, nobody has to ask why traffic cops are important. So it is with IT workload automation. The past few years have seen an exponential increase in IT activity—not only in the amount of data and number of jobs, but also in the variety of available platforms, systems and cloud-based resources.

With all this activity, workload automation has become mission-critical. It is evolving in remarkable ways to address strategic enterprise priorities. No longer is workload automation expected to merely execute workflows; today, new capabilities are coming online that can also lower infrastructure costs, create new services, and actually impact the reliability of eCommerce and other Web services.

Here are five of the major trends that will be transforming workload automation in 2013 and beyond:

1. SLA is becoming a workload automation requirement. The increasing importance of Business Process Automation (BPA) throughout the enterprise means that businesses are depending on IT than ever before to not just support, but also deliver, its most basic functions. As a result, SLAs are being imposed on workload management to make sure that BPA functions are carried out as expected. Look for more advanced monitoring and alerting in IT automation, as well as critical path analysis to ensure that high priority processes receive the necessary computing resources at the moment they’re needed.

2. BI is driving demand for real-time data. Weekly, daily, even hourly updates to essential information often don’t cut it any more. With managers in every corner of the organization—finance, marketing, production, sales, legal, purchasing, shipping, you name it—using Business Intelligence to make decisions, there is huge pressure on workload automation to provide the complex workflows necessary for real-time, or near real-time, data processing.

3. Predictive analysis will join reactive in setting workflows. While reactive automation built on dependencies and scheduling will never really go away, predictive scheduling based on historical analysis is ensuring that the necessary combination of internal, virtual and cloud-based systems and servers are established on the fly to meet workflow SLAs. In addition, forecasting will allow IT managers to plan job execution in order to handle spikes in demand. The result will be more efficient use of resources and fewer instances of underutilized infrastructure during downtimes.

4. BI and BPA are becoming complementary technologies. As business processes are increasingly “scripted” into routines for IT organizations to execute, automation solutions are playing an increasingly critical role in allowing IT to provide value and flexibility. The result will be seamless delivery of services—the marriage of business function with underlying technology.

5. The era of self-serve automation is beginning. In a more perfect world, virtually any information worker within an enterprise would be able to select processes and workflows from a workload automation service catalog, then order those processes with no help from IT administrators. Intelligent workload automation will soon support this trend, enabling systems to self-provision the necessary resources and then execute the process automatically.

As IT continues to evolve and the number of customer-facing services continues to grow, the need for intelligent workload automation solutions only becomes more important. We’re now a world where communications, information and Web-based services are expected anywhere, anytime, and on any device. With these demands at the very center of modern society, expect workload automation to play an ever-more vital role in the smooth and cost-effective flow of digital traffic.

This was posted in Bdaily's Members' News section by Advanced Systems Concepts, Inc. .