Workload Automation in the Modern Enterprise
At one time, it was common wisdom that Internet application delivery would do away with tasks like batch processing and the scheduling of recurring tasks. That hasn’t happened yet; and it likely won’t in the foreseeable future.
The number of batch jobs has diminished greatly, but they have far from disappeared. There is still a need for recurring application processes to perform activities, such as database extracts, data warehousing, and business intelligence, which have increased the need for critical back-end computing. Those workload automation processes must run securely, and in the proper sequence. And those processes must be able to check prerequisites and recover from runtime anomalies.
Workload automation is, thus, still a critical IT function. This white paper describes the fundamentals of process scheduling, how to ensure that back-end processing is secure, reliable, and resilient, and how to prevent a small workload automation failure from snowballing into a disaster.