Enterprise automation platform Workato has announced a series of new product capabilities that enable customers to expand their use of automation at this year's Automate 2022 conference.
The conference brings together Workato users and automation enthusiasts, showcasing where the industry is headed and real world examples of enterprise automation in addition to in-depth training and networking opportunities.
The product enhancements expand upon Workato's platform security, enhance the ability of builders to collaborate on developing automations and facilitate the expansion of automation to every business team across the enterprise.
"I've used other integration and workflow tools, but there were limitations to all of them. One tool would be good at integrating with a few things but not others, or it only did a certain type of action," says Sebastian Goodwin, chief information security officer, Nutanix.
"Then I saw Workato and how extensible it was. There were so many integrations that already existed in the Workato community, and if theres something that wasn't there, you could quickly create it. Ive never really seen anything exactly like Workato."
A recent McKinsey study found that two thirds of global businesses surveyed are piloting the automation of processes in one or more business units or functions. However, the majority of common business processes organisations use are still managed using email or spreadsheets. Legacy approaches to this problem such as business process management (BPM) and robotic process automation (RPA), have grown ineffective because they are not built for the systems and agile methodologies companies utilise today.
At Automate conference, the Workato team took a closer look at the following product enhancements:
Establishing a Higher Bar for Security
As a cloud native platform connecting sensitive business systems, security is a critical priority for Workato. The company consistently goes beyond common industry standards in the level of security provided in the Workato platform. The introduction of Secrets Manager allows customers to utilise external secret managers in Workato connections instead of providing their credentials to establish connections. This provides customers with stronger security postures and audit capabilities.
The newly released zero data retention feature gives customers who process sensitive data in Workato the ability to prevent the storage of transactional data such as address or social security number in Workato logs to stay compliant with data protection policies. The company also recently introduced Workato Enterprise Key Management (EKM) giving customers in highly regulated industries control, flexibility, and compliance over their encryption keys and their data inside of the Workato platform.
Improving Collaboration - Productivity in Building Automations
With increasing collaboration across builders of varying skill sets and capabilities, the ability to quickly understand changes between different versions of an automation recipe is critical. The introduction of Recipe Diff allows users to visually see the difference between versions of a recipe. This new capability presents a side-by-side visual comparison of different versions of a recipe making it easy for users to see changes made during the recipe development process. Recipe Diff makes it easier for multiple builders to collaborate on the development of a recipe, helps ensure architectural or recipe design standards are followed, and improves the ability of users to anticipate or troubleshoot potential problems caused by a change in a recipe.
Facilitating the Expansion of Automation Across The Enterprise
Enterprise automation has the potential to positively impact the operations of every business function, yet it can be difficult for organisations to determine how to effectively enable different teams to incorporate automation into their function. Deep experience in helping customers navigate the process of scaling how automation is utilised across their organisation has led Workato to introduce the GEARS framework. GEARS provides a set of best practices, templates and toolkits which combines the learnings from all of Workato's customers into an actionable set of assets for any customer to utilise. The core pillars of this framework focus on providing guidance for how customers should govern, enable, adopt, run, and scale automation across their company depending upon their business goals and level of maturity with automation.
"2021 was an incredible year for Workato and our customers. Our customers trust us by running mission critical automations passing sensitive data. We keep that trust by constantly innovating to provide industry-leading security features to protect our customers' data," says Gautham Viswanathan, co-founder and chief product officer, Workato.
"The extra layer of protection with EKM, zero-logging, and hourly key rotation gives customers a lot more visibility and control over their most sensitive data. With the right tools for security and governance, our customers can achieve a new level of trust and transparency between technology and business teams."