Stonebranch Blog What is Workload Automation—and How is it Changing?

Some call it job scheduling. Some still call it batch processing. Although workload automation could certainly be considered simply the latest iteration of the IT automation concept, there are several important distinctions that differentiate it from its predecessors. As you will read below, the traditional time-based job schedulers have now been eclipsed by event-based workload automation tools that respond in real time to business orders, rather than completing them by batch.  A Brief History The term workload automation was originally introduced by Gartner in their 2005 "Hype Cycle for IT Operation Management" report. At the time, the scope of IT automation was chained to the static and manual nature of job scheduling. Reacting to the increasingly dynamic demands of IT, the research company introduced the concept of workload automation. Workload Automation Defined Workload automation is the practice of using software to schedule and manage tasks related to business processes and transactions. A workload, in this context, can be thought of as the total amount of processing that a computer is conducting at any given time. Workload automation makes it possible for much of that processing to take place without human intervention. A large number of tasks are scheduled, rather than being done in real time. Transactions that require execution at a certain time, or based on a certain event, have thus become the domain of workload automation. It is thought of as a more advanced successor to job scheduling because of its ability to automate entire systems, which may contain heterogeneous IT environments as well as disparate job schedulers. What Workload Automation Does Best Central Management. Workload automation tools were the first of their type with the ability to centrally manage the execution of business processes across mainframe, cloud or hybrid environments, third-party applications and operating systems. Versatility. Workload automation can manage mixed workloads based on business policies, while efficiently assigning and releasing computing resources in an automated fashion to meet service-level objectives. Holistic Approach. Workload automation's intelligent approach to IT operations management enables end-to-end automation of enterprise-wide batch across the entire enterprise, as well as near real-time workloads across a heterogeneous computing environment.