As companies achieve better market penetration and expansion, they face challenges in efficiency, scalability, visibility, and speed in business processes. Unless they effectively unify and automate processes, costs begin to soar, and the quality of customer service declines. Workload automation is about improving back-office efficiency and streamlining transactions and processes.
The process of workflow automation is grounded in technology. It involves establishing a single source of control for operations, process scheduling, and the introduction of self-service capabilities.
Why bother with workload automation?
Artificial intelligence and machine learning today lead to faster, precise, and cost-effective business processes. The cloud simplifies and accelerates the production workload automation process. Forbes reports that 83% of business workloads will be shifted to the cloud by the end of the year.
Workload automation leads to streamlined and highly productive business operations while elevating the customer experience. The process removes routine, redundant, and inefficient tasks opening the way for purpose-driven, data-driven, timely, impactful, customer-centric, and cost-efficient operations. The process is closely related to job scheduling, and it involves making changes to your technology infrastructure and the way you gather, access, and use data.
The use cases of workload automation include:
- The sales process in marketing: SaaS software solutions can accelerate your lead generation and lead nurturing. The automation of sales and marketing processes leads to consistency in the buyer journey, even when messaging must be handled by diverse teams of staff, agencies, and consultants.
- Employee onboarding: Onboarding is a repetitive procedure fraught with the risk of human error. Self-learning cloud solutions can help remove the need to record an employee's personal and payment information manually.
- Self-service platforms: You can get access to automated customer service solutions that link to a knowledge database. It becomes easier to build bots that empower customers to serve themselves with guaranteed intelligent and accurate responses.
- Retail: An automated point of sales system automatically feeds sales data into a pricing or audit system daily. It leads to better tracking of sales and automated updating of retail pricing.
- Security and resource utilization on the cloud: Automated provisioning and access control can lead to efficient cloud resource utilization and better security.
Achieving workload automation
In technology, workloads comprise data, application configuration, and the configuration of hardware resources, support services, and network connectivity. The process of automation requires a comprehensive audit of each of these components.
Identify the right cloud solutions
Modernization of business processes can cause severe disruptions. An incremental approach to cloud migration can help you get there cheaply and without impacting productivity. You can start the process by finding manual business operations that can benefit from self-enablement cloud solutions.
Analyze application function and current environment
Some workloads need high performing network storage and may thus not be suitable for the cloud. Some others are legacy in nature and are not designed for operation in distributed computing environments. The same is the case for seasonal needs apps such as those used for short term projects. A workload automation framework is less burdened when you leave these out.
Assess computing resources and costs
Batch workloads such as those designed to pore over your transaction data require a lot of memory and storage capacity. These workloads run in the background and are not time-sensitive. Online workloads need more computing and network resources. When creating the business case for the automation process, analyze the costs involved in running them on the cloud versus leaving them on-prem.
Think about security and compliance
Security itself is a task that can be automated in the cloud, but it should nonetheless be an underlying principle in workload automation and orchestration. Carefully evaluate the security and compliance risks of the cloud options - including public, private, and hybrid - that you choose for the destination of your business processes.
Assess connectivity needs
Moving workloads to the cloud require network reconfiguration with regards to availability & accessibility security. Only a secure, highly available and high performing network can support reliable and impactful automation of production workloads.
Automate by department
The easiest workloads to automate are the processes in marketing, HR, and finance. Even though your business has its unique pain points, the hurdles to efficiency in these processes are common in most enterprises.
To Summarize:
Cloud computing is a compelling option for production workload automation. But cloud workloads are vulnerable to data breaches, account compromise, and resource exploitation. In partnership with Radware, which provides an agentless, cloud-native solution to protect both the overall security posture of cloud environments, as well as protect individual cloud workloads against cloud-native attack vectors, Cloudride can help you automate workloads and achieve superior efficiency without compromising security.
Radware’s Cloud Workload Protection Service detects promiscuous permissions to your workloads, hardens security configurations before data exposure occurs, and detects data theft using advanced machine-learning algorithms.
Together we offer end-to-end migration & production workload automation, helping companies just like yours get the best value from the cloud with services such as architecture design, cost optimization, and security, and a full suite SaaS solution for cloud workload security. The Radware cloud workload security solution automates and optimizes permission monitoring, data theft detection, and workload protection, complete with alerts and reports.
Schedule an exploratory call.