OpinionsCloud management

Did you ever wonder how your bank manages to send you a statement of your assets every single month? Have you ever noticed when you request your cable service provider to reprint your billing statement it always takes several days? Do you know why at certain times of the day your computer will slow down, appearing to do something in the background that you are not aware of?

Some processes are routinely performed after business hours, such as end-of-day high-volume application workload and management reporting. Other jobs are performed at the end of the month such as closing of accounting books. Many of these jobs take some time to process because the company doesn't have sufficient data processing capacity to handle these requests simultaneously. The synchronization of these jobs is the only way to meet the increasing demands on IT.

Job schedulers, also known as workload automation solutions, perform this function. A job scheduler is a software application in charge of unattended background executions, historically referred to as batch processing jobs, which represent 70% of the IT tasks performed today. Increasingly, job schedulers are required to orchestrate the integration of near real-time business activities with traditional background IT processing across different operating systems and business application environments.

Analysts recognize the importance of automation tools for improving the administration, operation and governance of heterogeneous physical, virtual and cloud data center environments. As we progress towards an IT service model where computing resources are delivered via some form of cloud, automation tools will determine the extent to which companies are able to successfully reap the benefits of the technology.