cloud computing

Business Benefits of Automation and Orchestration

Nowadays, many businesses leverage the newest technologies, such as cloud-based computing to improve business efficiency and productivity, as well as to reduce operational costs. That’s why there’s a lot of focus on automation and its implementation in modern business flows. Cloud computing allows organizations to automate repetitive tasks and speed up the processes. However, when leveraging automation, modern organizations tend to utilize orchestration as well.

Orchestration and automation are similar in essence, but their respective roles in improving business efficiency are altogether different. Moreover, automation and orchestration play a vital role in business environments, by helping organizations reduce time required to conduct specific tasks. That way, businesses have the opportunity to produce more output, thus improving their overall productivity. Let’s have a look at a few benefits of automation and orchestration for businesses.

What’s the difference between automation and orchestration?

In modern business and cloud environments, automation is referred to making a repetitive task automated. Simply put, allowing the task to run on its own without the need for manual interference. For instance, automating a task can mean anything ranging from replying to an email or posting on social media to launching a web server. Automation can be applied to both desktop and cloud related tasks.

On the other hand, orchestration refers to the automation of multiple tasks at the same time, making it a more complex procedure. In essence, orchestration manages multiple automated tasks to execute a bigger process or workflow. That’s why orchestration requires good management and coordination. In other words, orchestration is used to streamline and optimize both processes and business operations, while ultimately reducing the time-to-market and ensuring successful workflow.

More time to focus on other projects

Automation and orchestration can help eliminate time required to set up and execute repetitive tasks across various business departments. This allows an organization to reduce the costs of hiring additional employees who will be in charge of these repetitive tasks. Moreover, you can allocate your workforce to focus on other, more important projects, while automated orchestration streamlines business processes in an effective and fast way.

For instance, adding new servers, installing and configuring new applications, allocating storage space and more are some examples of tasks that could be automated and orchestrated. In addition, automating such tasks reduces the cost of IT support, improves productivity and standardizes workflow, so that it’s more consistent and dependable.

Faster time to market

For organizations that develop new products or services, it’s imperative to shorten the time-to-market as much as possible. The main reason is that being able to satisfy consumer needs on time is essential for ensuring their engagement and loyalty. After all, the faster you products reach online consumers, the better your chances of gaining a significant competitive advantage. Automation and orchestration help various teams collaborate efficiently on designing and developing new products or services.

Furthermore, reliable business orchestration allows you to create workflow that will help integrate different tools across various platforms and allow your employees to utilize the best means available in order to shorten the time required for new products to reach the market. When the entire product design process, ranging from development and marketing to sales, is empowered by automation, it takes significantly less time to create a viable product and deliver it to your customers.

Improved scalability

One of the major benefits that cloud computing offers to modern businesses is the ability to scale up and down based on their current needs. However, the online market shifts and changes all the time, which may force businesses to scale quickly. Through orchestration, businesses can optimize their cloud environment to scale their computing power on-demand, in order to meet increased business needs. Once there’s no longer a need for high computing power, businesses can simply scale down and reduce the operating costs along the way.

This increased demand for more output usually happens in holiday seasons when consumer needs also rise. The fact of the matter is that organizations can shift their IT infrastructure in a matter of minutes, via orchestration and automation. Without cloud-computing, that feat would simply be impossible to achieve on such short notice. That means that businesses would fall behind in meeting their customer’s expectation to competitors that have more in-house hardware installed.

 

Although automation and orchestration are closely aligned and depend on each other, they are essentially different. Businesses that wish to improve their efficiency and productivity need to consider both automation and orchestration, as well as their implementation in business operations. That way, organizations can benefit from faster and more efficient workflow, as well as from reduced operating costs.

You might be interested in the following