Anyone who has ever experienced the horror of having a sea of remote controls covering their coffee table with the big game about to start knows how frustrating it can be to configure your TV to the settings you want. The solution is simple: one remote to control all of your systems. With a few pushes of a button on a single remote, you can use one control to operate all of your devices- from the power and volume to cable/satellite and streaming devices.
The clutter that once plagued households across America is exactly the problem faced by IT departments today that have a multiplicity of scheduling tools and automation systems. According to Gartner, most organizations implement automation solutions as silos, having more than three automation tools in a single enterprise environment. Modern enterprise IT environments typically comprise numerous disparate systems, all built at different times on different platforms and often in different programming languages. IT teams are tasked with managing these siloed systems, which is both inefficient and costly.
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But just as there’s a solution for the home entertainment remote control problem, there’s a fix for the enterprise IT issue: Workload automation software. Automation serves as the 'universal remote' for enterprise IT, pulling together disparate systems to give administrators a single point of control for the entire enterprise. This helps increase IT agility by making it easier to create workflows and maintain existing processes, while also reducing TCO by saving on the time and costs Operations spends in maintaining multiple tools.
How does it work? First, it’s helpful to understand the scope of the challenge. IT departments today are confronted with increasing complexity, working with a range of technologies, including platforms, databases, and applications. As with home entertainment controls built around a single system, each technology within the IT ecosystem typically comes equipped with its own batch processing and job scheduling solutions, many of which require manual intervention and address only the system they were specifically designed to control.
As business systems and applications become more diversified and data flows across system boundaries, IT professionals struggle to keep up with basic scheduling tools that are designed to serve a specific, closed solution – much like a would-be TV viewer confronting a confusing array of remote controls. Modern IT automation can absorb the complexity of these multiple scheduling tools by giving users one unified solution that can automate and standardize file / data transfers, workflows, applications, and processes across heterogeneous IT environments.
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IT automation allows IT professionals to save time and money by automating repetitive, time-consuming manual processes and proactively managing alerts and notifications. This helps the company improve resource utilization and increase productivity. Workload automation allows IT teams to eliminate manual administration and reduce associated errors while improving IT department agility.
The key is to find the right workload automation solution, one that functions as a universal remote by simplifying business process automation and removing complexities. When evaluating a potential universal remote-style fix, IT experts should make sure prospective solutions feature an Integrated Jobs Library and proven technologies to simplify integration. Additionally, many intelligent automation solutions are automating an even wider range of processes in the area of DevOps, Big Data, and the Cloud.
The solution should be simple to implement, while also having the flexibility and depth to manage tasks across all platforms as well as handle custom business applications to enable fluent end-to-end workflows. When IT teams find the right workload automation solution, it’s like combining the functions of four or five remote controls into a single, universal system : It makes life much easier so you can focus on what’s important.
Sourced from Jim Manias, Vice President of Advanced Systems Concepts
