Control-M: scheduling at the service of the enterprise - everything you need to know
Control-M represents one of the most popular tools in the scheduling of business processes. Proposed by BMC Software, which obtained it in 1999 through the acquisition of New Dimension Software, it represents a powerful workload automation system (WLA). In practice, the automation of the workload allowed today by Control-M coincides with the so-called one-time batch scheduling. The difference is that now the application workflow processes are more and more numerous and involve the environments of enterprise companies on various fronts: from data governance to the management of big data up to data transfer needs. The need to govern all these processes and orchestrate them in order to have full control in order to release applications quickly arises from the combined need to reduce time to market and contain costs. Control-M for scheduling, therefore, is particularly suitable for those organizations that are facing an important digital transformation path.
How Control-M guarantees scheduling to enterpises
Digital transformation can involve, for example, more than one cloud provider or it can involve a lift and shift approach for migrating applications to the cloud and therefore implies a standardization of the process by which batches are run on systems. In fact, if we consider an enterprise-level company, there can be as much as 100,000 batches per day. To control its execution, a centralized system is obviously needed to which alerts, configuration management control models are associated, as well as full integration, for example, with change management processes. Control-M is, at the moment, the market-leading Workload Automation solution, because it is based on a very clear roadmap, also guaranteed by the more than twenty-year quality of the solution which, even after the acquisition by BMC Software, continues to be developed in the original research centers of Tel Aviv. This ensured a constant evolutionary path based on the presence of consolidated multi-year skills.
Control-M for the scheduling of new application scenarios
In the context of this evolution, Control-M currently brings batch scheduling into the new dynamics that see companies interacting with the world of hyper-scalers such as AWS, Microsoft Azure and Google Cloud. For example, deciding to move your infrastructure from on-premise to the cloud means orchestrating the integration of various features. Control-M does this natively through plug-ins that allow, for example, to execute AWS Lambda functions, to integrate with AWS and Google Cloud storage, or to schedule batches on Azure. The ability to fully integrate with file transfer software, replacing discontinued applications, is also part of the solution. Basically, having a single tool, instead of the application workflow chains that usually require customization, means facing lower costs in terms of licenses, a lower effort from the point of view of maintenance and, overall, a reduction in TCO (total cost of ownership).
Also, an answer for the tendency towards containerization
Another trend that Control-M must meet with its scheduling is the incessant increase in containerization models in companies. The propensity to shift budgets from infrastructure to applications in recent years has gone hand in hand with the growing adoption of software for virtualization of resources, Kubernetes and OpenShift in the first place. This has meant that the scope of integration scheduling no longer refers only to classic operations, that is, to run batches of operating systems, but to the very governance of applications. Governance requires a broader vision to be able to orchestrate the application workflow in its entirety. Hence the need for the choice of Control-M for scheduling to occur at the same time as selecting a partner with well-defined know-how and best practices. It is from the combination of these two factors that, ultimately, a solution like Control-M will be able to help optimize scheduling without aggravating the budget and the commitment of the company's IT resources.
