If the businesses dependent on Amazon had these capabilities, they would drastically reduce the outages they experienced. Orchestrating business workflows and associated data across applications and infrastructure is easier said than done. However, it can, and is, being done by many enterprises to assure service levels.

Being able to "roll-back" failed system updates to previous working versions, spotting process failures before they create an unrecoverable backlog, and the ability to run a workflow on newly provisioned environments is the type of higher-level process automation that abstracts inevitable outages from the user or business experience.

As enterprises get more serious about higher-level process automation, they will spend more time abstracting their processes from specific infrastructures and application environments. This abstraction is not only key to quickly managing an outage, it's also key to efficiently dealing with the growing created by today's hyper-competitive business environment.

Whether IT is ready or not, the business is doing whatever it takes to respond to changing market and customer demands by pushing IT to develop new applications at a faster pace and deploy them quickly (on highly virtualized infrastructure). Add that up and you get a lack of organization, infrastructure sprawl, and more fluidity as to where applications actually run, resulting in IT complexity and skyrocketing application-to-infrastructure dependencies.

It's at this point where the need for process abstraction and automation becomes acute. Because these interdependencies, which represent potential breakage points, are beyond human ability alone to manage. IT organizations are now forced to deal with these new realities while , , DevOps and pressures get added to the mix in the name of providing more business agility. With all these moving parts, something needs to be stable and act as the IT backbone. It's increasingly obvious that it's the process and process control.