Cloud Orchestration Vs Cloud Automation: How Do They Benefit Your Business?
Sunjay Randhawa of Automation Anywhere, explains the differences between cloud orchestration and automation. Uncover the findings here
Sunjay Randhawa, head of global & demand generation, Automation Anywhere, talks about the differences between cloud orchestration and cloud automation to understand how together, they can benefit your business. Both cloud automation and orchestration can become powerful tools that improve your business to run more efficiently on a daily basis.
Cloud orchestration refers to larger-scale cloud automation of entire processes or workflows. Together, cloud orchestration and automation can massively benefit businesses in five key areas. We’ll take a look at these four ways below.
1. Automating Data Migration
Data migration, or the process of transferring data from one location to another, is integral to the day-to-day workflows of many businesses. Unfortunately, it’s also very time consuming for human employees. That’s why it’s more productive to automate data migration altogether.
Boosting the productivity of a business in this way is useful for two key reasons.
Firstly, unlike their human counterparts, digital employees never tire or need breaks. This means that cloud automated workflows like data migration can continue to happen on weekends, during holidays, and even in the middle of the night.
As a result, data migration can happen around the clock.
Secondly, with cloud orchestration constantly taking responsibility for these repetitive workflows, employees can better allocate their time. Creative and innovative tasks can take up the majority of any employee’s workday, leaving them more time to do fewer things better and thereby improving overall productivity.
This means that employing more cloud automation actually creates resources, more so than it uses up. Automating a particular process doesn’t just boost productivity in terms of ensuring that the process happens quicker; it also creates opportunities for any surrounding workflows to happen more smoothly.
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2. Productive Automation and Profit Increases
A more productive company is one that hopefully earns more money at the end of the day. That’s one of the key reasons to invest in RPA if you are a small business or startup with a narrow profit margin.
In fact, small and medium-sized businesses have been predicted to adopt enough workflow automation and orchestration to generate a market opportunity of over $1.6 billion by 2026—and that’s to say nothing of large businesses or enterprises.
The more cloud automation and orchestration a business uses, the better that business will be at keeping ahead of this trend and making automated processes work in their favor.
3. Increasing Accuracy
Any business that uses human employees has to account for human error. However, this type of inaccuracy is just that: human. Cloud automation and orchestration eliminates these kinds of errors.
When you use automation in cloud computing, you’re ensuring that all orchestrated processes are as accurate as they can possibly be. This raises the standard of mechanical and repetitive processes.
This increase in accuracy is especially important when it comes to testing software. When you test the software you’ve created using automated testing, any results you obtain are guaranteed to be free of human error and are therefore more accurate. This makes cloud automated testing more reliable than manual testing.
Aside from the elimination of human error, automating more processes also helps increase accuracy in other ways when it comes to testing. In particular, it’s important to note that automated processes can be completed significantly faster than non-automated ones.
This means that a greater number of tests can be conducted in a shorter amount of time. As a result, it becomes easier to find flaws, which can then be corrected by an employee or a separate cloud orchestration.
More tests also mean results that are more suitable for extrapolation. By automating all of your testings, you’ll be able to safely say that your software worked in each of your numerous tests, without having to dedicate a massive amount of human resources to potentially conducting thousands of tests.
Companies that test their products extensively can provide their customers with a reliable quality guarantee. This boosts customers’ opinion of a brand, which in turn boosts sales and increases overall profits.
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4. User Account Management and Cybersecurity
Cybersecurity is only becoming more important with every year that goes by. Although data breaches are just one example of the result of poor cybersecurity, they’re nonetheless indicative of the scale of the overall problem. The graph below shows how the data breach problem has escalated in recent years:
Source: Statista
This shows why user account management is one of the most important use cases for cloud orchestration and animation.
Your business can—and should—leverage automation to enhance cybersecurity. For example, an automated process can be set up to check the integrity of your firewall(s) at regular intervals. Cloud orchestration can handle more complicated security checks, such as going over individual files to scan for viruses or malware.
To put it another way, automation—especially cloud automation—is a great tool to help your business in its scam and fraud prevention efforts. Cloud orchestrated processes can keep your business safe from fraud almost completely, ensuring that your cybersecurity levels are always excellent.
This level of protection can be enhanced even further by making tactical use of automation artificial intelligence.
Intelligent automation combines Robotic Process Automation (RPA) and AI technologies to deliver a powerful, sophisticated solution to any business problem that can be automated. Including cybersecurity.
When your business protects itself from scams using intelligent automation, it means that the AI becomes more effective the longer it’s kept in use. AI of this level are able to learn as they process more workflows, meaning that the more fraud and scam attempts your program encounters, the more effectively it will be able to recognize future malware.
5. Customer Service & Support Desk
Cloud orchestration and cloud automation have the power to massively improve business processes of all kinds.
It isn’t just about speeding up repetitive workflows or improving their accuracy. Orchestrating processes can also mean taking the processes themselves to the next level, such as by introducing new and helpful items into a workflow checklist.
A use case that illustrates this is that of a customer service and support desk.
Customer support requires employees to process a great number of documents as part of their daily workflows. By introducing cloud orchestration and automation, you can take manual work (and therefore the error margins, time consumption, and other negative points associated with human labor) out of document processing.
It also opens up the opportunity to make intelligent documents a standard part of these workflows. These have the power to improve productivity—and they work in particular harmony with cloud automation.
Intelligent documents are just one example of the ways in which a greater degree of automation and/or orchestration can benefit a business’ customer support capabilities.
Another common example of using automation to improve overall workflows is automating SEO-related processes. Any business can benefit from improving their SEO, since this will make them more visible to customers and allow them to reach wider audiences.
Cloud automated SEO processes might include keyword searches, checking a website’s rankings under common search terms, looking through old blog posts for those that could be improved, and/or ranking performance among various web pages or blog posts.
In short, automated programs can help you get to the bottom of your SEO performance.
Once you’ve learned how to automate SEO tasks, you’ll be able to reach a larger audience and, as a result, make more sales per year.
All of this goes to show that cloud automating and orchestrating more tasks improves workflows on the whole. This in turn benefits businesses by increasing revenue and customer flow.
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Conclusion
Cloud automation and orchestration are powerful tools that can help you improve the way your business runs on a day-to-day basis.
By using these two tools effectively, you can ensure that your business is as productive as it can be. You’ll be able to free up employees’ schedules by automating tasks, which also ensures that repetitive tasks are completed faster.
An automated process isn’t susceptible to human error, which means automation boosts overall accuracy. Orchestration can also be used to provide better cybersecurity to your business.
Lastly, by introducing RPA and other forms of cloud automation into your workflows, you can vastly improve the tasks and steps associated with these workflows.
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