Why your RPA's ability to soar could take your business sky-high

Let’s start with a little whimsy: If you could hitch a ride on a cloud, which one would you choose to soar into the sky? Choose carefully. Different types of clouds move at very different speeds.

Nimbus clouds (those low-lying, dark gray thunderstorm clouds) lumber along at 30 or 40 mph. Lenticular clouds, which encircle hilltops and peaks, barely budge at all, even in strong winds.

In contrast, cirrus clouds are born high in the atmosphere and can race along at more than 100 mph. In cyclones, they can rotate at more than 180 mph.

Back on earth in the business world

For the office, chances are you’re considering another type of cloud: cloud automation that will make your business processes and workflows fly like the wind. Digitization and automation are helping redefine customer and employee experiences and have become a must-have in almost all industries.

Digitizing your processes through Robotic Process Automation (RPA) will improve your performance, speed, and productivity. RPA bots are built to navigate through your process software and automate many of the required basic tasks.  

On-prem vs. cloud-native

Just like the clouds in our skies, the speed of your automation depends on how your RPA platform was created, where it lives and how it moves. Most RPA solutions are still designed for on-prem and are just delivered via the cloud. They bring with them all the hassle (upgrades, fixes, and other related disruptions) of deploying and maintaining traditional software and infrastructure. Their monolithic architecture lacks modularity. It’s cumbersome and slow—a nimbus rather than a cirrus.

In contrast, a true “cloud-native” application (which can be integrated, delivered, and deployed seamlessly in the cloud or in a hybrid mode) makes processes fly.

Built for speed

Years ago, Automation Anywhere set a goal to be the first cloud automation provider to create a robust foundation for speed. We invested in the hard work required to re-engineer an entire architecture, deliver the product as microservices, and migrate it into the only completely cloud-native platform now available.

Completed in 2020, this wise move has boosted us to #1 market status and a great partnership with Google Cloud. Automation 360™, our flagship product, is now helping customers on average scale three times faster at one-fifth the cost of on-prem solutions.

“The Automation 360 cloud-native web-based platform is a game-changer,” said Yasmine Rodriguez, CTO of Asure Software and Automation Anywhere customer, in a presentation at Imagine Digital in April 2021. “The simplicity of the web-based, cloud-native automation platform allows us to rapidly implement solutions…Its Document Automation™ product, in particular, allows for the scanning of documents such as invoices, wage garnishments, tax notices, onboarding forms, and extracts of implementation data. Couple it with RPA for data update and insertion, and you will have eliminated thousands of work hours.”  

Cloud adoption continues to accelerate market-wide, and more than 50 percent of our new customers are now choosing cloud-native automation. It’s exciting to see sites that cover transformative technology, such as VentureBeat, call out strong cloud growth as the way forward for the market and recognize that our focus continues to be on simplifying the challenges of migration to cloud-native.

What cloud do you want?

I’d advise anyone on the verge of automating processes to ask themselves what their choice of cloud should be. A “cloud-washed” application that requires downloading, managing, and maintaining? Or a cloud-native application that, with one click, unleashes the full power of automation?

Our customers’ need for speed has, in effect, helped reshape the RPA market. Being only human, our customers may not be able to hop on a high-flying cirrus cloud, but if they can access the web, their processes can always catch a ride on the Automation 360 platform.