Has your business and your team faced the following questions recently?
- Does your organization face troublesome issues of fluctuation in revenue flow because of seasonal variations in work?
- Do your overburdened employees have a hard time meeting clients’ demands efficiently?
- Do you feel your organization’s time and resources are underutilized?
- Are high-volume and no-brainer, repetitive tasks robbing off your personnel’s job satisfaction?
If so, it makes sense to start pondering on whether your company is ready for Robotic Process Automation (RPA) or even better, for Cloud-based RPA. This article, “Cloud-based Robotic Process Automation: A guide on taking RPA to Cloud”, will help in learning how to digitally transform your organization and be business and market-ready!
To fully understand the idea of Cloud-based RPA, we have broken it down into 2 parts, i.e.:
- The Cloud Infrastructure and
- Robotic Process Automation (RPA).
What Is Cloud Infrastructure?
Cloud Infrastructure facilitates on-demand storage and retrieval of data on a shared network instead of the company’s local servers. Cloud services providers enable the users to access their data, applications, and software stored on remote servers via the internet.
The most common cloud storage service we all have been using habitually is Google’s email service- Gmail or Microsoft with its Office 365 platform and also Amazon’s AWS (Amazon Web Services), etc.
So, what does it take for the Cloud to accomplish this? The answer is the front end and the back end.
1. The Front End:
This Means client-side development, e.g., a company’s computer used to access the stored data from a remote cloud computing space through either a dedicated application or a web browser. This is where the user interacts with a company’s website or web application.
2. The Backend:
Consists of Servers, applications, computers, data storage systems, or virtual machines. This is the part that the users cannot see and where everything happens before a page or an app is displayed to the user.
What Does Cloud Computing Offer?
- It empowers organizations on a global level and eliminates the need to install the software in users’ local computer systems.
- With the ease of availability of sophisticated applications, users work with more flexibility.
- It significantly reduces the cost of infrastructure to host and manage in-house software and allows the company to channelize IT and human resources for more strategic tasks.
- Enables upskilling of the workforce in an organization.
What Is Robotic Process Automation (RPA)?
RPA uses software or bots. It refers to the machine-driven automation technology that imitates human actions and takes over high-volume, sometimes complex, and repetitive human tasks.
Individual business logic and pre-defined structured inputs that are interpreted by software robots to do things like right keystrokes, identify and extract data, or other manual business processes like an automated response to emails, ERP, etc governs automation. But software can carry out all these tasks efficiently and eliminates human errors.
However, with the potential advantages RPA offers, the organization must also consider having an efficient RPA implementation strategy.
Although the existing IT infrastructure will not be entirely useless, the necessity to upgrade the IT systems with RPA architecture cannot be denied. Thus, the successful deployment of RPA might be more complex and costlier if the strategy is not accurately implemented.
But It Is Now Possible To Mitigate The Aforementioned Limitations With Cloud-Based RPA.
Cloud-Based RPA
Cloud-based RPA is a SaaS (Software as a Service) based automation solution. It means that the building and maintenance of automation software is now the responsibility of a service provider.
Although on-premise RPA is a more traditional approach, and with the entire IT industry migrating to Cloud-based RPA, it is gaining popularity even with small and mid-sized companies.
The cloud-based RPA industry has a range of cloud partners viz., Amazon Web Services (AWS), Microsoft Azure, IBM Cloud, Google Cloud Platform (GCP), etc. who are vying for the attention of small- and large-scale organizations.
Benefits Of Cloud-Based RPA
- The service providers are no longer dependent on local resources. Hence, they are more likely to come up with the best and more powerful solutions for clients.
- Cloud platforms comprise vast infrastructure as opposed to on-premise installations. Hence, the speed with which Cloud-based RPA applications grow is unmatched.
- It is easily deployed, has a low turnaround time of implementation, and is faster to respond to changes. Hence, provides better ROI, if used strategically.
- It relieves organizations from high, on-premise maintenance and upgrading costs.
- It has a wide range of solutions owing to its pervasiveness, which ultimately eases the complex process of selecting the processes that can be automated.
- Due to its advantage’s viz., faster communication and sharing options, organizations can achieve replicability and scalability in their automation solutions.
What’s Next?
Cloud-based RPA is indeed helping businesses experience an unprecedented potential to access and share powerful applications. With robust designs and efficient implementation strategies, Cloud-based RPA has proven its mettle.
Nonetheless, Cloud-based RPA is no magic lamp. It is a long-term commitment and demands smart strategies for the automation process to be efficient and ROI yielding. So, organizations must set pragmatic expectations and anticipate some challenges while automating their processes.
Also, enterprises cannot overlook their responsibilities. They must comprehend the models offered by vendors and make wise choices to avoid future mishaps. Since users access the data over the network, organizations must also devise their best practices and privacy policies to avoid any security breaches.
Finally, with the advent of automation, organizations must address the employees’ insecurities about their livelihood and encourage them to upskill and learn about the latest trends in the industry. So, with all these strategies, the enterprises can successfully navigate through the technological transformation and gain a competitive edge over other players.
