If your organization is like several others, you’re contemplating about how to move ahead after the COVID-19 pandemic. What kind of business solution do you require to keep up pace again, to make sure that you have productivity, business continuity, and the best working experience for clients and employees. This blog is with regards to why cloud-native intelligent automation should be on your to-do list this year. 

To start with, let’s review where things lie in the business world. In simple terms, as we are all aware, the planet has changed. Businesses and persons around the planet have been impacted. Due to COVID-19, most employees are working from home, at all hours, here, there, and anyplace. And that likely won’t change in the future. 

Workforces have been impacted by illness or the requirement to trims costs or because workers have departed for prospects that are emergent from the pandemic freeze. The ones who are left are usually working harder and longer – and to put it in simple words, they’re tired. 

Enterprises have witnessed demand for their offerings fall or, in a few scenarios, escalate during the pandemic, magnifying the thought that the capability to scale as required is a survival requirement. Resiliency, the capability to weather natural and man-created disasters, is another business continuity lesson hammered home during the course of the pandemic and one that is top of the head with enterprises looking for solutions. Another requirement that’s top of the mind is expenditure optimization. 

This challenging period has forced several C-suite leaders to fast-track their cloud migration plans. As a matter of fact, 27.5% of IT leaders who were surveyed in a latest IDC research agreed that large-scale cloud migrations were “critical for business survival” moving forward. 

Now more than ever before, businesses are required to transform their several distinct processes and functions through an integrated cloud strategy and transformation journey. All of these coalesce together to give shape to a “cloud-first strategy”. This should start now with deciding an optimum cloud strategy and execution plan for seamless migration and modernization to the cloud. It must be secure and cost-effective, deploying the correct expertise to make the most of cloud’s diverse tools, unlocking current intelligence and insights driven by cloud data models, and revisualizing business functions to come up stronger as an innovative enterprise. 

Removing the work from work 

As of late, intelligent automation (IA) bringing together Robotic Process Automation (RPA) and artificial intelligence (AI) has provided a solution for enterprises looking to improve their business in a plethora of ways. The technology automates, streamlines, and quickens up business processes, enhancing productivity, time-to-market, and the client/staff experience. IA can assist organizations rise up to a challenge coming out of the pandemic: the overworked employee. It can relief employees of tedious, mundane activities and enable them to engage in more higher value work. 

A research undertaken by EY discovered that “Businesses who implement automation prior to the crisis started are probable to be experiencing lesser issues while maintaining a steady workflow, maintaining productivity, assisting clients and support employees. 

More advantages by adding in the cloud 

According to Forbes, “As organizations continue to learn from and adapt to business requirements brought on by the COVID-19 pandemic, one constant stays: The cloud is a game-changer. Gartner specifies that “Worldwide end-user expenditure on public cloud services is predicted to grow 23.1% in 2021 to a total of $332.3 billion, up from $270 billion in 2020.” 

What can cloud add to smart automation for post-pandemic enterprises? In a new planet of remote work, cloud computing offers anytime, anywhere access. With their operations in the cloud, businesses can demonstrate increased resilience to disasters and less susceptible to attack than when leveraging on-premises solutions. A cloud provider’s success is dependent on providing the most secure, updated services. 

Scaling on-demand becomes simpler in the cloud with no on-premises infrastructure to slow down operations. No on-premises infrastructure also implies no capital or upkeep expenditure. 

With smart automation in the cloud, enterprises can move quicker, easier, and more securely, adapt better to altering market conditions, and be more cost-efficient than with on-premises legacy solutions. The cloud solutions are already demonstrating transformative outcomes, which includes efficiencies and innovations that drive lasting  business change at scale and speed. 

And we come to cloud-native intelligent automation. 

All those benefits from the ground up 

Cloud-native is a solution that is developed from the ground up to enhance cloud RPA. As specified in another Automation Anywhere blog article. “When making investments in a cloud-native enterprise application, enterprises benefit from an always updated product with automatic updates, quick and simple setup on the web without the requirement for physical infrastructure, very minimal maintenance, and higher value with the capability to scale vertically and horizontally. Any business can be more productive with its daily utilities. 

Cloud-native has three design aspects to keep the benefits of smart automation in the cloud always on. 

Microservices architecture 

Microservices is about taking one large service and dividing it into smaller services. While self-contained, the microservices are connected to other services with application programming interfaces (APIs). Every microservice is allocated a job. For instance, Netflix employs hundreds of microservices in its streaming service: a microservice for showing recommendations, one for viewer profiles, one for maintaining track of viewing history, and one for parental controls, to specify a few. 

This architecture provides advantages for development, deployment, and use. Not like on-premises solutions, cloud-native intelligent automation doesn’t need a client-server approach to deployment of software. Software bots are developed with a group of microservices – no requirement to spend the time setting up a desktop client or finding out which solution version to leverage. 

After a bot is developed, it can be swiftly shifted for review, evaluation, and deployment, quickening up development. Automatic cloud updates makes sure developers are always leveraging the updated tools. 

A cloud-native solution also provides a benefit with updates. On-premises legacy technologies employ monolithic architectures. Any time updates required to be made, the entire application must be updated, having the outcome of service disruptions. With a microservices architecture, one portion of an application can be updated without impacting the whole. 

In addition, a microservices architecture provides improved benefits with regards to scalability and security. Microservices can automatically scale horizontally to include capacity without disruption of service or needing lengthy planning. With regards to security, the micro design makes it simple to determine where security patches require to be deployed. And any microservice that has been breached or threatened can be simple to swap without – again creating a disruption. 

Containerized infrastructure 

The microservices are consisted in packages, facilitating quick, secure, reliable and flexible development, evaluation and deployment of features and capabilities. Any problem with a microservice can be isolated and repaired inside the container. 

CI/CD development framework: 

The term continuous integration and continuous delivery (CI/CD) is a reference to operating principles that bring together best practices and the latest technology to make sure that product updates are delivered consistently and reliably. With this cloud-native framework, the solution is improving at an ongoing basis, while facilitating incremental updates without the requirement for major upgrades. 

Move ahead with cloud-native 

Cloud-native implies you can deploy bots to a global workforce at scale, in seconds. Organizations that demonstrate resilience in the face of these massive behavioral and cultural shifts will require a technology backbone that embraces the cloud. This will enable them to replace their fixed technology expenditures with SaaS models, minimize their liquidity crunch, and invest in upcoming growth with variable expenditure structures. Cloud-native assists in developing more flexible talent structures and supply chains to tide over shortages and drive demand-driven planning and execution. Organizations comprehend this, and this new realization is what is driving the swift adoption of technologies like the cloud RPA across growth markets.  

Cloud-intelligent smart automation can take you where you require to go in present day’s new business world – for productivity, business continuity, and the best working experience.