Digital processes are responsible for delivering data, reports and files that support everything from day-to-day operations to customer services. A recent study by Rackspace, a major cloud provider, found that customer experience (CX) is a strategic priority for IT leaders, underscoring the business’s growing reliance on digital.
In order to expand, businesses need to effectively manage their digital workloads. This means creating secure, reliable and efficient processes that can deliver services, data and sensitive information to both internal users and external customers.
Unfortunately, digital processes can become incredibly complex and difficult to manage as businesses grow. Suddenly there is more data, applications and services to manage across different systems. Manually managing these processes is too time-consuming and error-prone, causing delays that can quickly impact customers.
Let’s take a look at how businesses can successfully manage complex workloads.
1- Provide Event-Based Automation
Traditionally, workloads are set up to run on recurring schedules. For instance, credit card transactions might be scheduled to run in overnight batch windows. But increasingly, businesses are requiring workloads to run throughout the day, at any time, based on the real-time needs of customers.
Event triggers can be used to kick-off workloads based on IT and business events. For instance, if there is a change to a dataset, a workload will automatically push those changes to other systems. Workflows can be triggered by a variety of event types including email, system startup and more, reducing slack time and latency for more efficient workloads.
2- Use Low-Code/No-Code Automation
Event-based schedulers enable users to trigger workloads based on business events. Instead of having a process run each day at the same time, for example, the same process can run each time a file is dropped into a directory. This can help ensure that reports and data are delivered quickly, improving the accuracy and usefulness of that data.
However, building these processes from scratch is time-consuming, especially when relying on custom scripts. Low-code and no-code automation solutions are an alternative, providing pre built functions that users can drag-and-drop into processes.
This can drastically reduce the time spent building and maintaining digital processes. Customized functions and templates can be reused, and changes can be cascaded to thousands of processes at once.
3- Gain Deeper Visibility
Workloads manage data across a variety of applications and systems, especially as businesses grow. What this means is that workloads are usually managed in silos, making it difficult to gain a complete view or understanding of the business’s workloads and event scheduling. So that when something doesn’t go as planned, your employees are left searching through multiple systems for answers.
Having a single repository of workload logs can help businesses quickly identify issues. This can usually be done through workload automation software that can connect to other job schedulers. In other cases, a single workload automation tool can be used to replace schedulers with limited functionality.
Gaining visibility across workloads also makes it easier to identify ways to optimize your workloads. This can include analyzing processes to find bottlenecks, common delays and recurring failures to make sure workloads are reliable and efficient enough to meet your business’s digital demands.
4- Streamline Compliance
The digital processes that support your business often contain sensitive data, for example personally identifiable information, which must meet internal and external regulations. Data regulations keep evolving, and maintaining compliance in complex digital environments can be difficult.
Workload management solutions often provide ways to enforce compliance standards across all workloads, simplifying the compliance process by removing the manual work that goes into each workload.
For example, existing user accounts in a directory service (such as Microsoft’s popular Active Directory) can be used to manage access to critical workloads and processes. Additional capabilities such as full audit trails, TLS/SSL and multi-factor authentication help organizations more easily meet compliance needs.
And don’t forget about your file transfers: workload automation software can support secure file transfer protocols to ensure that sensitive data always meet GDPR and HIPAA rules.
5- Support Reliable Integrations
Your business is going to need new tools and applications as the business grows. Workloads will have to manage data and information across those new endpoints. However, integrating new tools can be a challenge, slowing down digital initiatives for 85% of organizations, reports ZDNet.
If you are looking for software to manage workloads, make sure the vendor provides integrations for platforms and operating systems in your tech stack. Prebuilt integrations that are designed and maintained by the vendor can provide reliable functionality as dependencies are managed across systems.
Today, more organizations are moving towards API-based integration strategies. These internal web services offer standardized methods for connecting new endpoints, especially cloud-based services. Workload automation solutions can also provide REST API adapters that enable your team to quickly build connections using low-code and no-code features.
6- Improve Scalability
Scalability is critical for business growth, such as rolling-out new services or operations. As demand for a service increases, more workloads will be required. This includes more infrastructure to execute those workloads on time.
Hand-selecting servers for every workload is both time-consuming and inefficient. Server allocation should be automated so that, when demand for a service grows, your system configures additional CPUs as required. Automation makes this process more efficient and cost-effective so that systems can scale dynamically based only on what is necessary to deliver a service.
Additionally, advanced scheduling algorithms can optimize existing resources by determining the best location for a workload to execute at runtime.
7- Enforce Documentation
Visibility into workloads can be a challenge as your business grows and evolves. In many cases, the person who created a workload isn’t the person who has to manage the workload in the future.
Documentation is the practice of explaining how a workload operates and what it’s intended to do. This is critical when troubleshooting workloads that were created by someone else. Documentation should be required for each new workload or process when a self-documenting platform isn’t being used.
Workload optimization doesn’t have to be time-consuming. With the right tools and practices in place, manual tasks can be eliminated and processes can be streamlined, improving efficiency and the customer experience.
