However, the industry has only started to abstract the business process from the applications and infrastructure that supports it. To work around an Amazon EC2 outage, organizations really need to utilize more than one provider to avoid a single point of failure. Yet in order for the business to be successful at this there needs to be the ability to reroute and rerun the process in their own or an alternative service provider. This is where higher-level process automation comes in.

The recent outages at Royal Bank of Scotland, BATS Global Markets and others demonstrate the inability not only to abstract the process from the infrastructure but to see the interdependencies and the failures that plague complex IT systems as well. In those particular outages, it took minutes to fix the problem but days to find it.

that keeps track of the complex interdependencies between applications, infrastructure and business workflows can help identify, or even predict problems. Then in the case of an unavoidable outage, the business workflows would be rerouted to an available data center.

Most process automation done today is low level IT administrative tasks for provisioning servers, handling backup or startup routines, and generally doing infrastructure tasks that require little decision making that could affect the line of business. This is necessary and important, but not sufficient to preserve the user experience or business process integrity in the face of increasingly complex IT environments where, statistically, something is always failing.

Enterprises must step up their IT process automation to the point that they can manage business workflows not just servers or IT tasks.