In an increasingly digital world, IT upgrades are essential for staying competitive. At the same time, modernisation initiatives are failing at an alarmingly high rate. We believe that some of the most significant roadblocks to modernisation can be overcome using automation.
Many firms have been forced to enhance agility, efficiency, and scalability within their organisations in order to adapt to the challenges of the COVID-19 pandemic. As a result, digital transformation programmes have accelerated, rethinking processes, services, and day-to-day operations for an increasingly digitized world. Businesses are stepping up their efforts to modernise IT to accommodate new digital projects and growing business requirements.
Some IT modernisation efforts, on the other hand, are not always effective. They can be disruptive and difficult, especially for businesses that rely heavily on outdated or legacy technology stack. Digital transformation refers to enterprise initiatives that leverage new technology to reimagine processes, services, day-to-day operations, and even business models. Netflix, for example, used to ship out DVDs until it reinvented its business model as the world’s first streaming service by using broadband internet (a novelty at the time). Essentially, digital transformation is a wider business strategy that includes upgradation of IT as one of the components.
Along with IT modernisation, workload automation (WLA) and other extensible automation systems can be used as orchestration engines. Organisations can practically automate any IT or business use case with broad functionality and integration capabilities, regardless of whether the endpoints are on-premises or in the public or private cloud. Low-code WLA solutions with reusable templates and prebuilt connections may be used to quickly integrate new technologies, allowing employees of any skill level to build end-to-end processes spanning infrastructure and service levels.
Overall, many modernisation needs may be avoided and simplified using WLA. If an IT shop still uses OpenVMS to manage batch operations, for example, a WLA solution may be used to trigger processes within OpenVMS, avoiding the need to rip-and-replace the outdated software in some circumstances. COBOL-based systems, cron schedulers, and any other legacy technologies that have outlived their usefulness are in the same boat. Selecting a WLA solution that can serve a wide range of use cases, allowing your team to combine or coordinate legacy tools under a single, low-code solution, is critical to finding the proper WLA solution for your modernisation needs.
Nikhil Markad is an associate with Simplex Services.
Photo by Randy Fath
