Gartner’s Workload Automation Trends for 2022

This article covers Gartner’s workload automation trends in 2022. To read the latest predictions for 2024, check out Automation ROI, Hyperautomation, Generative AI for Automation — What’s Coming in 2024.

IT environments and processes have changed significantly in the last few years. In many ways, the future arrived earlier than expected: Initiatives for digital transformation and adoption of cloud services and infrastructure accelerated as organizations faced new demands in response to the Covid pandemic.

The strategies and tools for workload automation (WLA) similarly face a need for rapid evolution. Traditional approaches and cloud automation solutions are unable to meet the needs of the new IT environment and changing face of business. So, what is the future of workload automation in the coming year and beyond?

A Changing Landscape for IT Operations

Organizations have embraced new technologies to deliver on the cost reduction and improved operational performance promised by digital transformation. Self-contained on-premises data centers have shifted to containerized infrastructures and multi-cloud or hybrid cloud environments. The use of new business applications and services has also expanded the ecosystem as APIs and web services enable easier and faster connectivity with traditional ERPs and other enterprise applications. And organizations have increased their use of big data for machine learning, artificial intelligence and analytics across the enterprise.

These technology changes also reflect a shift within the business as CIOs, IT professionals and automation software all have a role to play in improving customer experience and competitive differentiation. Organizations need greater agility and innovation from their IT and Infrastructure & Operations (I&O) leaders for IT process optimization and for delivery on value-based KPIs, rapid time-to-market and profitability.

These technical and operational shifts require significant changes to IT automation strategies and workflows, and business leaders are taking action now. According to Gartner analysts Chris Saunderson and Manjunath Bhat, by the end of 2024, 80% of organizations will have embraced a very different model for the delivery of workload automation.

Gartner also estimates that by 2025, more than 95% of new digital workloads will be deployed on cloud-native platforms. In the same timeframe, they predict that more I&O leaders will go all in with automation with a predicted 70% of organizations implementing structured automation to deliver flexibility and efficiency.

Why Workload Automation Must Evolve

Traditional workload automation solutions and providers evolved from job scheduling tools, and while WLA delivers on the key values of operational efficiency, reduction of human errors and cost savings, it still carries many limitations in functionality from its initial design.

Many workflows in traditional workload automation are still managed by careful coordination of scheduled tasks. However, customer expectations for responsiveness and competitive differentiation require business tasks to run in near-real time. In 2023, Gartner found that existing workload automation strategies simply aren’t able to cope with the increasingly complex workload types, volumes, and locations of evolving business demands.

Workload automation capabilities have also traditionally been focused on core workflows around ERPs or other siloed technical or operational domains, with many organizations operating multiple workload automation tools independently. This type of automation leaves gaps that lead to inefficiency, errors and manual processes, with no clear visibility into the performance of the overarching business processes the automation is intended to support.

Inability to deploy flexible WLA strategies also impedes business growth. Without collaboration and automation inside and outside of IT, business and IT teams find themselves facing siloed capabilities.

In all these cases, the limitations of the traditional approach to workload automation prevent IT and I&O leaders and teams from shifting their automation strategy to focus on the higher-value goals of innovation, agility and customer service.

Gartner’s New Model for Workload Automation

In Gartner’s analysis, the model for workload automation must adapt to address these strategic and operational shifts. In fact, they predict that by the end of 2025, 80% of organizations currently delivering workload automation will be using Service Orchestration and Automation Platforms (SOAPs to) orchestrate workloads across IT and business domains. 

Fundamentally, they believe that the scope of workload automation must expand both horizontally and vertically to deliver automation of a full business process, where each business process is viewed not as a set of discrete tasks but a complete cross-platform service coordinated from end to end.

SOAPs adapt to new use cases for data pipelines, application architectures, and cloud-native infrastructure. This expands the role of traditional workload automation and complements and integrates with DevOps toolchains. The result? Enhanced operational efficiency, standardized processes, and cost savings, all while providing customer-focused agility.

Gartner has identified six capabilities that differentiate SOAPs from traditional IT workload automation and will be essential for business and IT operations.

• Workflow orchestration to enable end-to-end coordination of a business process across its underlying technologies and present a unified view of that process. Through this orchestration, IT teams can eliminate gaps in automation to gain efficiency and insight that can ensure and even optimize performance.
• Event-driven automation to react to events or data in real-time, running processes to handle them as they occur rather than queuing or delaying for batch processing.
• Scheduling, monitoring, visibility and alerting gives IT operational information to meet SLAs and proactively resolve issues, and keeps business users up to date on the metrics and processes they care about.
• Self-service automation to empower business users, developers and other teams to directly interact with and initiate automated workflows.
• Resource provisioning to perform configuration and provisioning of compute, network, storage and other resources needed for devops initiatives including development, testing and deployment of IT infrastructure.
• Managing data flows to orchestrate the data lifecycle through ingestion, transformation and storage pipelines as real-time streams, batched transactions or file transfer.

A Unified View of The Automated Enterprise

The new requirements for workload automation extend its role and value beyond its traditional scope and use cases, but SOAPs do not replicate or replace other specialized IT automation software. Rather, they become a central hub that orchestrates business processes through integrations and other, complementary forms of IT automation technologies such as Robotic Process Automation (RPA), DevOps and infrastructure management toolchains.

However, IT organizations with multiple workload automation tools can and should consolidate them into a single business process automation platform to eliminate the costs, inefficiency and fragmented views that result from these separate tools.

Workload automation performs a critical role within IT operations, but it must evolve to adapt to the advancements in technology and changing business needs to deliver more value to the organization and its customers.