The Future of. Workload. Automation

Transcription

1 The Future of Workload Automation

2 From Enterprise Job Scheduling to Intelligent Workload Automation: An Introduction Technology is in a constant state of evolution, and the world of automation is no exception. In this ebook, we ll consider how you can stay ahead of the competition because in the application economy, it s vital to ensure the tools your organization uses are capable of positioning you at the forefront of industry not just today, but tomorrow as well. Initially conceived to serve the data centers of old and manage power-hungry mainframes, workload automation was subsequently adopted across smaller and more cheaply distributed systems and applications. Up until 2005, the rhetoric was still very much focused on job scheduling, at which point Gartner introduced the concept of an IT Workload Automation Broker. This shifted attention to eventbased processing, a concept that increasingly underpins cutting-edge workload automation tools. While in many cases event-based processing is yet to be fully mastered, those at the forefront of innovation are now beginning to take it even further, as advances in machine learning and artificial intelligence open up new opportunities. At the same time, we are witnessing a change in where business processes are run, from on-premises data centers to virtualized and containerized models right through to the advent of serverless models. We are heading toward a scenario where workload automation tools are capable of thinking for themselves and making decisions based on policy; this is what we at CA Technologies are calling intelligent automation. At the same time, however, more and more challenges are being presented as the increasingly fragmented places our workloads run begin to impact our analytics, reporting and processes. The task is to navigate these hurdles while at the same time allowing our enterprises to harness the power of new technology. 2

3 Workload Automation and the Modern Software Factory The opportunistic ways of the past no longer deliver the requisite agility for a customer-responsive, application-centric business model. Manual handoffs and scripting between tools and teams create delays, bottlenecks and errors. A paradigm shift is required to meet business demands. Last year at CA, we introduced the concept of the Modern Software Factory to help organizations follow a blueprint for success in the digital age. As your organization undergoes its digital transformation into a Modern Software Factory, you will be capable of adapting to both market disruption and customer demand. The net result will enable you to create an agile business, build better apps faster, maximize app performance and make security a competitive advantage. Facilitating the Modern Software Factory are four pillars: agility, insights, security and automation. Automation underpins the other three, linking disparate parts of the organization together and orchestrating business processes. Ultimately, automation is the backbone of the Modern Software Factory. 3

4 The Need for Agility In ERP and legacy software Although enterprise resource planning software is often integral to core business processes, it can be slow and inefficient, requiring unreliable manual input that holds back the rest of the organization. A modern workload automation solution should be able to bring agility to the entire enterprise, aligning ERP software with cuttingedge front-end tech. This helps reconcile the multigenerational structures outlined by Gartner as an integral step for the modern enterprise. Companies will have to manage older systems and at the same time connect them to modern digital programs, because multigenerational IT involves different layers of technology, all of which need to be automated from the bottom up. If we consider that an organization can use ERP systems to undertake a vast array of tasks, including corporate purchasing, stock replenishment and payroll, then the software must be responsive to rapid changes on the front end. But this requires a huge amount of manual input perhaps as frequently as every 30 minutes to ensure the results of reports are correct, completed on time and without risk: an inefficient and unreliable approach. Put simply, in the modern era it has become essential to enhance the pre-existing capabilities of an ERP solution, meaning business processes are completed on time and to a higher quality. At the same time, IT staff will gain several hours a day to work on more innovative tasks, while administrators will benefit from more visibility to ensure corporate governance objectives are met. As automation becomes more intelligent, we can take this a step further, enabling the tool to investigate and resolve broken steps itself, minimizing any manual interference even more. 4

5 The Need for Agility At CA, we worked with Genworth International, a lifestyle protection and mortgage insurance company that was looking to enhance its Oracle database as part of its digital transformation. The main stumbling block? Over 130 manual steps were required to close financial and accounting books each month. By deploying CA Automic Workload Automation, the company was able to reduce the monthly financial process close time by 74 percent, saving 100 man-days per year. Moreover, Genworth was provided with intuitive design tools and reusable objects, as well as the ability to manage complex dependencies. Consequently, operations staff no longer needed to wait for the production run to discover system failures; instead, automated alerting ensured problems were rapidly identified and resolved. A daily pre-flight check queried CA Automatic Workload Automation to identify, test and alert issues with core components. It s not just ERP tools that create a bimodal structure, but legacy systems such as mainframe also need to be modernized in order to drive digital transformation. Many large-scale enterprises are still reliant on the mainframe, and yet it forms just one part of an increasingly diverse technological landscape. As such, we need to be able build workflows that traverse mainframe, distributed systems, the cloud and hybrid environments. However, the reality is that not many workload automation products have these capabilities yet, and as such are only able to serve the needs of small to medium-size businesses. Ironically, the more technology moves forward, the more important it is to synchronize with the older systems that the business still relies upon. Clearly, the future of workload automation is still very much dependent on its ability to connect with the past. 5

6 The Need for Agility In data Until recently, organizations were reliant on static data warehouse automation, which would produce reports at specific times for instance, every Monday at 4 p.m. However, the landscape has dramatically changed now that big data has been introduced into the equation. This means we are now creating data lakes (in addition to our data warehouses) to store anything and everything, with the intention of analyzing it at a later date. Moreover, big data brings an unprecedented velocity that organizations must be agile enough to handle. And if we want our organization to be dynamic enough to handle big data, as a prerequisite our automation must also be more dynamic. At CA, we saw this with a U.S.-based cinema organization that implemented dynamic automation to manage its social media interactions. Until this point, its points of sale had become disconnected from the corporate data center, which meant marketing and sales decision making lacked data-driven insight. By implementing CA Automic Workload Automation, the company was able to automate the transfer and processing of points-of-sale data, with enough scalability to support over a half a million requests per day. As a result, the corporate side of the business is now able to gather information and consolidate it within 15 minutes. Depending on movie attendance data or, indeed, any other piece of information it's possible to orchestrate social media campaigns, drive audiences, extend releases and automate communication with customers. 6

7 The Need for Insights As the previous example demonstrates, speed is just one of the tangible benefits modern automation solutions can bring. However, the ability to turn data into tangible information that can be acted on is equally fundamental to the modern business. Intelligent automation As ever, companies want faster response times, better-informed decision making, improved resource utilization and lower costs. But improving service delivery without redefining all business processes and IT architectures has, up until recently, been problematic. The traditional approach to workload automation is now changing dramatically once again. Identifying business events as a static series whether by a timed schedule or recurrent polling has a number of limitations and is no longer sufficient. By contrast, the leading automation tools enable intelligent event-flow correlation to trigger or control activity. With this in mind, CA Automic Workload Automation s algorithms correlate to thousands of external events instantly, dramatically reducing latency in business workflows and guaranteeing information delivery and integrity. This capability substantially reduces the complexity of pre-scheduling application processes, which is critical given the pace of change and increasing level of interdependencies across today's complex heterogeneous environments. American Electric Power has used intelligent automation to help transform its interactions with customers. When the company found itself unable to keep up 7

8 The Need for Insights with calls during significant power outages caused by incidents such as large storms, automation was put in place to correlate calls from customers with the amount of power being consumed in the area. If this dropped, it meant a larger problem; if not, it was probably individually related to the household s fuse box. Once a larger problem is detected, the automation platform connects the engineers systems and registered users. This creates communication flows of the problem and resolution time frames to stop customers from calling the call center. Ultimately, intelligent business automation can sense and synthesize large amounts of data for driving complex processes and workflows, learning and adapting dynamically. Adding intelligence to automation will usher in a new era for productivity and innovation, setting new standards of speed and agility. The CA Automic Event Engine As information flow and event traffic increase exponentially, it has become practically impossible to understand how changes in assumptions or conditions in one arena will affect operational delivery in another. Therefore, to gain the requisite insights and deliver intelligent results, a workload automation tool far surpassing basic job schedulers and script runners is needed. It must be able to check itself, understand its own business context and enable a company to move from a reactive approach to the proactive intelligent management of business processes. Organizations should be implementing a workload automation tool that possesses the ability to not only run a process, but also determine the result of it. This means the workflow has completed and succeeded only when it has delivered the expected business outcome. Instead, as it stands, too many tools simply operate as glorified job schedulers, telling you something is complete regardless of whether or not the processes have run errors. They are unable to either analyze their own actions or remedy any errors of their own accord. 8

9 The Need for Insights Once again, this means your staff will be tied up investigating the root cause of why a process failed firefighting rather than innovating. The CA Automic Event Engine has been designed with this in mind. It is a software application within CA Automic Workload Automation, built for controlling tasks and handling events. It enables organizations to sift through massive data streams, interpreting, analyzing and responding in real time. The CA Automic Event Engine detects critical business events, analyzes them and then triggers downstream actions to keep your business on track. This means your automation process is aware of the underlying business context, facilitating the move from reactive to proactive and intelligent management of operations. The CA Automic Event Engine is built for the future, offering extremely scalable real-time processing up to 50,000 events per second. Events coming in from various sources can be easily filtered using semantic logic, and it directly triggers automated workflows through dedicated event objects. Furthermore, it is fully integrated into the visual designer user interface, meaning no scripting is needed. Clearly, the CA Automic Event Engine will help your organization stand apart from the competition. The significant gains in agility are made by detecting critical situations early, using the event correlations that facilitate proactive management. This is further enhanced by the ability to respond immediately to incoming event exceptions. Moreover, the event engine reduces the number of incidents and avoids downtime using complex decision scenarios, and supports improvements to your overall service quality through integration with real-time reporting and analytics. 9

10 The Need for Security As technology advances, becomes more interconnected and traverses an array of environments, new security issues are constantly created. A modern automation tool should be well equipped against new challenges, and they should be encapsulated within the automation policy itself. New technology doesn t typically have the same holes in it. Thus, you should be looking for a workload automation tool that has been built from the ground up several times. CA Automic Workload Automation has been developed with security in mind and includes a number of features that minimize risk and future proof your investment. These components reduce both the number of internal weaknesses and the surface area of targets for external attacks. CA Automic Workload Automation makes it possible to give access to operating systems and servers to only a limited number of users, which means fewer people have access to sensitive information and user actions can be more easily traced. This tool can also reduce the number of communication channels within an organization, and all communication on these channels is encrypted, better protecting internal communications from interception or interpretation by anyone other than the intended recipients. The automation tool also uses proxy servers, which can obscure the company s internal network structure from outsiders, making it more difficult for them to launch an attack. Finally, if something does go wrong, real-time monitoring makes it apparent and, in many cases, can identify the source of the issue so it can be resolved as quickly as possible. With these features, CA Automic Workload Automation helps safeguard your investments against security threats. 10

11 The Future Automation is not static our technology evolves alongside our working practices. At CA we see this happening on several fronts, some of which are currently in a very tangible state of change, while others require more speculation. The advent of software as a service (SaaS) has changed how businesses purchase and consume software. Organizations are continuing to move from the traditional operational expenditure (OPEX) model of purchasing software (whether hosted on-premises or in the cloud) to the OPEX model of SaaS. Many of the ERP software companies now provide their solution through SaaS offerings. Whereas in the past we ran workloads in our own data centers physical, virtual or containerized strong adoption of SaaS has fragmented the places where they run, creating more islands of automation. Today that already impacts our business processes. The mobility of workloads is now accelerating further and is once again being dramatically impacted as we move into the world of serverless architecture. This switches our purchasing model to simply paying for what we consume, without overheads, while at the same time providing us with scalability and high availability. However, serverless workloads also create more and more silos, adding complexity and reducing visibility. It is therefore vital to implement a workload automation solution that can support and scale along with these evolving environments. 11

12 The Future Looking into the future, the concept of scheduling will change: Today we still provide a time when something should start looking for an event or to start a process. In the very near future this will disappear, with policies of automation causing execution to occur and fulfill the service objectives (or SLAs) of the business. The automation platform will make the decision about when this should be started, based on all other policies, available resources and conflicts on the systems, to deliver the results to the business when the business requires them. We are also at the tip of the iceberg when it comes to realizing how new technology might affect the landscape. Recently we have seen how blockchains are disrupting the status quo, and the necessity for automating the integration between them and the outside world has already become apparent. At CA, as we look toward the future, we already have a service in place that advises customers on the configuration of their systems and compares them to those of their competitors. We actually use this data lake ourselves to understand how our product is used in the field and to help us drive further innovation. 12

13 ADVANCED ANALYTICS YOUR PATH TO OPTIMIZATION Conclusion While the Internet of Things, big data and cloud computing have all meant a massive increase in the velocity and volume of business processes, the next major step is going to be artificial intelligence (AI). In recent years, there has been a race by some organizations to try and commercialize AI, but as with all tech evolution, a better approach would be to first understand what it can bring and then apply it to a use case. The companies that embrace this strategy across their future automation policies will be the big winners and in long run, winners will commercialize the results, not the algorithms themselves. At this point in time, the CA proposition is to introduce intelligent automation and work toward an end goal where we no longer need to set a start time to schedule something. CA Automic Workload Automation allows you to harness the technology of today while future-proofing for tomorrow. 13

14 To learn more visit ca.com/automation CA Technologies (NASDAQ: CA) creates software that fuels transformation for companies and enables them to seize the opportunities of the application economy. Software is at the heart of every business, in every industry. From planning to development to management and security, CA is working with companies worldwide to change the way we live, transact and communicate across mobile, private and public cloud, distributed and mainframe environments. Copyright 2018 CA. All rights reserved. All trademarks referenced herein belong to their respective companies. This document does not contain any warranties and is provided for informational purposes only. Any functionality descriptions may be unique to the customers depicted herein and actual product performance may vary. Some information in this publication is based upon CA s experiences with the referenced software product in a variety of development and customer environments. Past performance of the software product in such development and customer environments is not indicative of the future performance of such software product in identical, similar or different environments. CA does not warrant that the software product will operate as specifically set forth in this publication. CA will support the referenced product only in accordance with (i) the documentation and specifications provided with the referenced product, and (ii) CA s then-current maintenance and support policy for the referenced product. There are no claims that a CA Technologies product or service has been designed to or may be used by clients/customers to meet regulatory compliance obligations (financial or otherwise). CA does not provide legal advice. Neither this document nor any CA software product referenced herein shall serve as a substitute for your compliance with any laws (including but not limited to any act, statute, regulation, rule, directive, policy, standard, guideline, measure, requirement, administrative order, executive 14 order, etc. (collectively, Laws ) referenced in this document. You should consult with competent legal counsel regarding any Laws referenced herein. CS _0318