Why You Should Treat Automation as a Standard ‘Layer’ in Your IT Solutions Stack Stack

In its early days, IT infrastructure virtualization was introduced in a piecemeal fashion as organizations ran proof of concepts and deployed discrete virtualization solutions. Over time, virtualization became an accepted and pervasive element of enterprise IT environments – both on-premises and in the cloud.

Process automation is on a similar path, with automation moving from siloed point solutions to becoming an end-to-end “layer” that sits above all of an organization’s applications and cloud services and manages the processes that flow across them.

Given that many applications and services already include automated processes, it may seem as if an automation layer already exists within the IT solutions stack. In practice, however, such a layer must span and integrate all of the discrete automations and serve as a foundation for creating new automated processes.

Furthermore, many existing automations focus on digitally centric processes such as data transfers between systems. An automation layer based on robotic process automation (RPA) technology can integrate these types of automations but also add the ability to automate many of the human-computer interactions. User interface processes, of course, often become inefficient bottlenecks within complex, end-to-end processes.

By its nature, an RPA-based automation layer must be able to integrate easily and efficiently with all of the underlying applications and cloud services that it spans. Without such out-of-the-box integration capabilities, any potential benefits that a new process automation might deliver can be negated by the labor and costs associated with custom-building interfaces to each IT element that a workflow crosses.

Once an organization establishes an IT automation layer, it becomes far simpler to implement an automation first approach that tackles discrete manual processes enterprise wide. The automation layer provides a standard and consistent foundation that every department, and even individual employees, can access and exploit.

The UiPath Platform provides all of the elements that organizations need to create umbrella automation layers that encompass all of their on-premises and cloud-based infrastructure. UiPath and its partner community offer dozens of native integrations and ready-to-go automations for virtually every popular application and public cloud service.

To broaden its extensive integration offerings even further, UiPath recently acquired Cloud Elements. The acquisition brought more than 200 new native integrations into the UiPath portfolio, helping UiPath customers to develop RPA automations even more rapidly.

For further information on how the UiPath Platform can help your organization establish an enterprise-wide automation layer, go here.