SOLUTION BRIEF CA PROCESS AUTOMATION. How can I simultaneously reduce costs, empower IT staff, and increase quality?

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1 SOLUTION BRIEF CA PROCESS AUTOMATION How can I simultaneously reduce costs, empower IT staff, and increase quality?

2 SOLUTION BRIEF CA DATABASE MANAGEMENT FOR DB2 FOR z/os Achieve rapid cost and time savings while simultaneously increasing IT operational security and quality. Improve service delivery by over 90 percent. Improve IT staff skills by not wasting valuable talent on routine processes. Eliminate manual errors that cause service outages. Improve speed for provisioning infrastructure by as much as 70 percent. Healthcare Reduce time to Security provision applications Solutions: by almost 95 percent. Protecting Your Organization, Reduce resolution time by up to 50 percent. Patients, Deliver 2.5x And improvement Information in delivery times over manual processes. Document 100 percent of IT processes. Achieve 100 percent compliance for process-driven configuration settings.

3 3 Solution Brief: CA Process Automation ca.com Executive Summary Challenge Today s IT environments are not for the faint of heart. IT assets are expensive, huge investments ride on the successful use of key tools, technical skills are transient and costly and IT faces relentless demands for accelerated service delivery, change management and improved cost performance. How can IT meet these unrelenting pressures simultaneously and in an uncertain business climate? Opportunity One way some smart IT teams are meeting these combined pressures is through IT Process Automation (ITPA), also known as, Run Book Automation (RBA) or Orchestration. Because of the success of these IT teams the question is no longer if ITPA can optimize the value of IT investments in staff, storage, networks, servers, applications, infrastructure as well as private, public and hybrid cloud environments. The question facing today s IT organizations is how to gain the value from ITPA as quickly as possible, how to do it in a way that minimizes risk and how to ensure it will be sustainable and scale reliably. Often this means replacing older RBA technologies with second-generation RBA tools which are enterprise capable. Benefits Given the importance of ITPA and the various options available, how can IT leaders make the right tool choice and avoid the pitfalls that can ruin the best laid plans for ITPA? By ensuring an ITPA solution meets four decision criteria, IT leaders can be confident that they will benefit by implementing a successful and sustainable automation strategy. These criteria are: 1. Coverage of the entire IT process lifecycle 2. Industrial strength architecture 3. Coverage of wide-ranging and complex processes 4. Alignment with existing automation such as job scheduling tool

4 4 Solution Brief: CA Process Automation ca.com Full Lifecycle Support for Automated IT processes Rarely does technology differentiate itself on cost reduction, quality improvement, flexibility, control and security, but CA Process Automation can. A quick sketch of the phases in the lifecycle of an automated process illustrates how it does. With CA Process Automation you can: Identify and define IT processes iteratively The fastest way to iteratively identify and define IT processes that will offer high value when automated is to leverage existing definitions. CA Technologies offers an extensive library of well-defined processes as well as platform support for finding those you want when you want them. IT teams can also draw on CA Services and our expert partner community. However, because every IT environment is unique, pre-built definitions, while important, are most useful when they get IT quickly into the next phase: authoring. Author quickly Best practice demands that IT processes are authored visually and with forms. Visual authoring quickens the pace of development while at the same time improves quality. Our rich graphical user interface supports drag-and-drop construction without requiring IT to use DCML or other domain specific XML dialects. CA Technologies also supports form-based parameterized process initiation which ensures process triggers are easily developed and as rich as possible. Another key requirement for authoring quickly and designing iteratively is to not require developers to be omniscient. IT environments are complex. If an ITPA platform has poor exception handling or fails to support runtime process remediation, then developers can be forced to solve for every obscure configuration before getting value from automation. It is much better to support agile methods which focus on quick iterative improvements instead of long drawn out development processes. Test efficiently No one wants to deploy automation into production before it is adequately tested. The CA Technologies platform provides a rich test environment. Simulations are available to test components as well as entire processes. Testing can be done locally without integration dependencies on automation targets or remotely where the connections are also validated. As with everything else in IT, if testing takes too much time, quality goes down and risks go up because testing rigor gets compromised. When testing requires redeployment of a modified IT process, it lengthens test cycles, reduces how much testing can be done, encourages shortcuts and risk taking, and lowers the ROI of automation. With Runtime Process Remediation a process can be modified while it is running reducing development, test, staging and implementation times. This is because there is no need to re-start with every modification and IT can pick up where the exception is found.

5 5 Solution Brief: CA Process Automation ca.com Transition flawlessly IT can eliminate the redundant manual mapping and configuration challenges faced with other tools by using CA Technologies rapid deployment features. These features reduce transition risk and complexity because a single IT process can be reused across different environments with a single click. An oft promoted benefit of ITPA is that IT processes are documented for free. Once the IT process has been automated there is a visual artifact that can be used to satisfy documentation requirements. However, this benefit is reduced if each IT process requires many variations to satisfy deployment constraints. CA Technologies rapid deployment helps ensure that the benefits of IT process documentation are not eroded. Manage securely With built-in zoning of networks, security, servers, applications and any other orchestrated resource, CA Process Automation lets IT promote automated flows through each phase of the lifecycle from one place. This not only supports a best in class security model for controlling privileges but makes governance efficient. Furthermore, because of our best-in-class security model, CA Process Automation provides unmatched control for runtime security and permission setting in order to meet the most stringent security requirements. For example, it has FIPS compliant integration with CA Embedded Entitlements Manager, native LDAP and Active Directory support available out of the box. Figure A. Automated Provisioning

6 6 Solution Brief: CA Process Automation ca.com Optimize easily The key to implementing a long-term, successful ITPA strategy is to anticipate the constantly increasing rate of change within IT. Change can cause the cost to maintain and evolve an ITPA solution to grow unacceptably high. It can diminish or even eliminate the promised benefits. Two critical areas that drive maintenance costs up are: challenges related to changing an IT process flow and challenges related to monitoring and managing defined IT processes. When the IT environment changes, IT processes often need to change. CA Technologies has focused on making these required changes minimal and easy to make. When IT identifies opportunities to enrich an existing process, the IT process will need to change in order to capitalize on that opportunity. Only with Runtime Process Remediation can processes be edited while they are running, saving countless hours by not requiring IT to go back to the drafting table and redevelop, retest, and redeploy every slight adjustment to a running process. By tightening the design-deploy loop, CA Process Automation also makes documentation easier to read and maintain, and therefore, more reliable. When Runtime Process Remediation is combined with our advanced exception handling, IT can catch and, if desired, automatically rerun IT processes that had exceptions. A typical example of how this can lower the challenges of managing running processes is when connectivity is disrupted while a process is executing. CA Process Automation can catch the exceptions, automatically know what to do since it supports various exception types and automatically reprocess those exceptions once connectivity has been verified. Optimizing easily means lower cost of ownership. The low cost of ownership with CA Technologies solutions is a key reason to replace older RBA solutions. Because of its low cost to maintain, CA Process Automation has replaced more costly competitor tools. Because of the lower cost of ownership, CA Process Automation, customers have been able to create specialty teams that identify, define, test, deploy and manage processes without the risks and costs that frustrate users of competing process automation platforms. Rock-Solid, Industrial-Strength, Enterprise-Grade Architecture While support for the entire lifecycle is critical, even more important for long-term success is having an architecture matched to the demands of the global enterprise. Designed from the ground up with large, complex enterprises in mind where IT is both mission critical and heterogeneous, IT Process Automation from CA Technologies accommodates multi-platform and multi-tenant environments and does so with scalability, stability and security. Because CA Process Automation s architecture supports both agent-less and agent-based technology it is distinguished by its ability to use agents where appropriate, while still maintaining an agent-less configuration for overall orchestration. This flexibility allows CA Technologies to orchestrate across more complex data center architectures which span diverse systems, security environments and locations. Consequently, deployments of ITPA from CA Technologies are less complicated, less risky and less costly.

7 7 Solution Brief: CA Process Automation ca.com Anticipating the great variations in each IT shop, the CA Technologies architecture has multi-environment process deployment and control capabilities with a unique touchpoint concept which enables users to configure a process, or specific versions of a process, for any environment from a centralized library and rapidly deploy. CA Process Automation is built on an industry-proven, multi-tenant capable, clustered architecture that provides horizontal scale across the enterprise without the issues of peer-to-peer synchronization management. This not only provides value to Managed Service Providers (MSPs) and outsourcers but also to multi-national enterprises which occasionally have IT islands operated within local subsidiary companies. These capabilities also appeal to any enterprise with distinct business units looking to achieve synergy across disparate and distant environments. Because of the CA Technologies solution architecture, enterprises can achieve a rare balance between enterprise governance and department-level initiative. There are several benefits that arise from this. First of all, because of the architecture, each IT department can automate independently while still complying with enterprise-wide governance policies. The ability to automate at your own speed has been greatly valued by CA Technologies customers. Secondly, senior managers and enterprise architects seeking to gain efficiencies and agility by orchestrating across departments and functions can use the same platform. This means less complexity, less context switching, less costs and less demand for divergent technical skills. Thirdly, because CA Technologies uses the same core automation technology across its client, server, cloud, service desk and service catalog solutions improved collaboration and reuse is possible across IT functional areas. Combining CA Technologies enterprise integration model, industrial grade ITPA engine, and extensive support for protocols and pre-engineered connectors means IT can optimize processes more broadly, more robustly, in less time, with less complexity and with greater reliability, availability, and maintainability than competitors can. Figure B. Advanced Exception Handling

8 8 Solution Brief: CA Process Automation ca.com Flexible IT Process Automation CA Process Automation delivers exceptional value to IT staff and IT s bottom line in part due to the wide range of IT processes it supports. Each enterprise needs processes which support industry best practices while also accommodating situations unique to its business. Because CA Technologies, as a company, is strategically committed to managing multiple virtualization platforms, aggregated (heterogeneous) cloud environments, automated workloads and a market-leading array of IT management tools, CA Process Automation is uniquely positioned to best support the vast portfolio of end-to-end processes required of IT. Below is a sample of areas CA Process Automation has added value. A few of the many use cases supported by CA Process Automation Workload Lifecycle Management Cloud Orchestration ITIL Incident, Change Management Virtualization and provisioning Self service and request fulfillment Check in and promote jobs based on a job name, pattern, application or group. Validate jobs against specific attributes in the job definition. Roll-back jobs to a target date based on job name, pattern, application and group. Promote a set of jobs from one CA Workload Automation AE instance to one or more possible successor states. There can be multiple successor states for a source state. Automate health checking of jobs and trigger self-healing processes. Automatically trigger cloudbursting based on SLA policies and the immediate computing requirements. Allocate and deprovision compute capacity in the cloud dynamically to use what you need and then not pay for dormant but costly cloud services. Add, reprioritize, or remove cloud providers from existing processes. Automatically provision, change, and audit logs to support elastic demand for a truly agile and trusted cloud environment. Quickly integrate with service catalogs and other cloud enabling systems. Trigger data gathering to automatically enrich event/incident tickets so the service desk has the information they need. Automatically run remediation processes based on incident triggers to heal systems and minimize downtime. Collect rich data automatically to support root cause analysis and problem management. Orchestrate change approval processes and provide enriched data for improved risk assessment. Orchestrate change execution with full roll-back for lower risk, faster change and greater compliance Automatically provision virtual servers or desktops (with the right storage, applications, and network based on parameters captured in a service catalog). Automatically recover/ harvest virtual environments either at end of reservation period or at a checkpoint. Integrate asset and license management, IT accounting (chargeback), and service desk ticketing and change control as part of virtualization services. Perform routine maintenance on VMs. Provide a request portal to orchestrate Automation AE events outside of typical calendar or other dependencies. Allow user to choose the execution model for fulfillment: - Run now - Run at a specified time - Run based on an external trigger Automate fulfillment of technical and business users by orchestrating across IT, Financial, and HR tools and processes. Provide labs on demand capabilities for development and test teams. The above are only a few examples of how CA Process Automation is used in data centers around the world. A complete list is impossible to compile because of the solution s flexibility, but other process areas include disaster recovery, security checks and policy enforcement, and both log and data management. CA Technologies also offers workshops to help IT teams identify, qualify, quantify and accelerate automating processes that will benefit their enterprise the most.

9 9 Solution Brief: CA Process Automation ca.com CA Technologies has invested considerably to provide a library of pre-engineered IT processes, integration capabilities, Quick Starts, tutorials, and reusable sample processes. This library is constantly being expanded by our ITPA dedicated Content Factory, CA Services, diverse product teams, customers, and partners. See the below inserted table for more details on CA Technologies investments in providing the building blocks IT needs to succeed with ITPA. CA Process Automation s pre-engineered capabilities Operators Connectors Quick starts Power packs Intergrated solutions Choose from over 100 core operators covering typical control functions, methods or activities that fulfill a step in a process. IT is able to augment these foundation operators with custom operators to support unique input fields and then make them available for reuse by other content designers. Benefit from the CA Technologies connector library of more than 75 pre-engineered integrations which target the IT and business applications your company is likely using today. Use over 300 quick starts which deliver a combination of processes and connectors to shorten your development times when building more complex automation processes. Save time and reduce risk by adopting best practices provided by stand-alone packages of ITPA content. These quickly allow IT to integrate and orchestrate various use cases. Examples include: Power Packs for CA Workload Automation AE Power Pack for VMware View VDI (CA Virtual Desktop Automation for Vblock Platforms) Power Pack for Event Incident Orchestration Power Pack for Microsoft Windows 7 Migration Power Packs for ITIL (Available through CA Services) Collaborate across IT by leveraging embedded ITPA capabilities in CA Technologies and our partner solutions such as: CA Automation Suite for Clouds and Data Centers CA Technologies VCE alliance and support for Vblock Infrastructure Platforms CA IT Asset Manager CA Service Desk Manager CA Service Catalog Extensible Integrations Supporting IT Processes No two IT organizations are the same. Every IT organization needs orchestration of its many, often unique, resources, tools and assets. Consequently, it is not enough to have a robust capability to model complex processes, an enterprise grade ITPA solution must also support an almost infinite number of integration targets. To do this CA Process Automation is comprised of a set of modular components that support industry standard technologies but can also be adapted to unique environments. This means CA Technologies can deliver an integrated process automation solution to address the complex needs of both traditional enterprises and service providers. CA Technologies has invested significantly to facilitate orchestrating a broad selection of IT infrastructure management systems and applications and supports over 100 operators for robust processes, logic and

10 10 Solution Brief: CA Process Automation ca.com integration protocols including: SNMP, SOAP, REST, SSH, JMS, FTP, JDBC/ODBC, SMTP/POP, LDAP, JMX and others. Furthermore, IT can rapidly create custom integrations using common CLI or standard web services. CA Technologies has also built scores of deployment-ready connectors to support IT and other third party integration targets so IT can automate the environment IT currently has as well as the environment IT expects to have in the future. Below are a few of the examples of targets CA Process Automation can integrate with either through a re-built operator using a standard protocol or through a pre-built connector. Integration examples using CA Process Automation Representative Targets Various Examples Sample Benefits Asset Management tools Cloud environments Configuration and CMDB Disaster recovery and storage platforms Monitoring CA IT Asset Manager, CA Client Automation and more Amazon AWS Elastic Cloud (EC2), VCE vblock, VMware vcloud, and more BMC Atrium, CA Cohesion Application Configuration Manager, HP UCMDB, CA Configuration Management Database and more Symantec Backup Exec and more CA ehealth, CA Spectrum and more Orchestrate end-to-end processes for improved asset accounting, security and compliance controls. Single and multiple cloud bursting for flexible capacity, automated capacity on demand that is triggered by service catalog orders, demand spikes, capacity trends and more. Stop configuration drift, add decision support for process branches using CMDB data and more. Systematic and rapid recovery, controlled and protected shut downs, automated storage provisioning and allocation and more. Automated remediation, automated event enrichment processes and more. Mainframe systems IBM z/os and more Automated health checks and remediation. Networking CA NSM and more Network provisioning, automated health checks and more. Physical and application infrastructure IBM AS400, Microsoft Windows, Solaris, AIX, HP-UX, Oracle, MSFT SQL Server and more Automated data driven maintenance tasks, automated stack provisioning and more. Portals Microsoft SharePoint among others Automated health checks, automated maintenance, recruited to support other IT processes and more. Service Accounting and Service Catalog Service Desks Virtualization platforms CA Service Catalog and more BMC Remedy, CA Service Desk Manager and more VMware vsphere, Microsoft WindowsServer Hyper-V and more Automated fulfillment, data driven pricing and more. Automated bidirectional ticket management, improved response times and more. Automated control of VM Sprawl, provision on demand, improved compliance and more. Workload Automation CA Workload Automation AE Automated health checks, self-service request management, automated transitioning of jobs from test to production and more.

11 11 Solution Brief: CA Process Automation ca.com Why CA Process Automation? With support across the entire ITPA lifecycle, industrial grade architecture, exceptionally broad support for wide-ranging and complex IT processes and automation targets and an integrated approach for automation solutions, CA Technologies simply provides a greater ROI on automation, a more sustainable platform to meet your long range automation goals and stronger security controls than anyone else. Learn how CA Process Automation can dramatically improve IT service levels, lower risks, keep key talent focused on the most important areas of IT and remove costs permanently from routine IT operations so there is more to invest in innovation and in growing the business. CA Technologies Can you visually build IT processes and use form based triggers? Can you correct exceptions in a running process and continue to completion from that point? Can your default settings handle exceptions and error reporting? Can processes adapt to resource variations with a single click? Can you logically separate and control multiple data centers and departments? Can you choose to use agents or run agent-less? Can you support Windows, UNIX, Linux and Mainframe automation? Does your ITPA platform align with your existing Workload Automation or job scheduling platform? Is your automation platform specifically designed to deliver value faster and scale better than competitors?

12 12 Solution Brief: CA Process Automation To learn more visit: ca.com/us/process-automation.aspx To see more visit: Your CA Technologies sales representative ca.com/us/collateral/demos/na/ca-process-automation-demo.aspx To do more contact CA Services at ca.com/us/services-by-practice-area.aspx Connect with CA Technologies at ca.com CA Technologies (NASDAQ: CA) creates software that fuels transformation for companies and enables them to seize the opportunities of the application economy. Software is at the heart of every business, in every industry. From planning to development to management and security, CA is working with companies worldwide to change the way we live, transact and communicate across mobile, private and public cloud, distributed and mainframe environments. Learn more at ca.com. CS200_123956