Automating and Orchestrating the Third Era of Enterprise IT

Enterprise Management Associates, July 2012, Pages: 4

After the passing of the mainframe era and the age of distributed computing, today we are at the beginning of the third era of enterprise IT. This third era focuses on delivering business services in a more efficient manner and is highlighted through three key trends: Cloud, Big Data, and DevOps.

Cloud, Big Data, and DevOps all focus on leveraging IT to make the organization more competitive through increased agility and efficiency. The third era of enterprise IT is characterized by a radical focus on utilizing this agility and efficiency for eliminating the traditional rift between IT operations and business process requirements. Ultimately, business stakeholders investing in IT resources are not interested in technical reasons for why a certain IT service is not attainable. For the overall organization to be more competitive, IT must help align business processes with market requirements more quickly and at a lower cost than the competition.

Cloud, DevOps, and Big Data initiatives all have grown out of the need to address the rising number of interdependencies between enterprise applications along with the ever increasing amount of data that those new systems collect. Yet all three of these initiatives can exponentially add to the complexity of the infrastructure needed to facilitate the demand for agility. For IT to reliably execute business workflows, these interdependencies must be managed end-to-end across the traditional automation domains, including workload and run book automation, virtualization management, managed file transfer, and application process automation and release management. Automation today can be seen as the "glue," tying together a rapidly growing number of business applications and aligning these applications with their respective business processes. Therefore, it is essential to implement a platform that can provide cross domain automation, instead of following the traditional siloed approach of deploying a myriad of domain-specific automation solutions.

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