Following up on the previous article RPA Doesn’t Care Who Your Cloud Service Vendor Is a few questions may come to mind when thinking a bit deeper into cloud RPA services integration. Those questions are still related to how third-party cloud services may integrate into your RPA vendor of choice. While the answer is that your RPA cloud vendors can integrate with anything, let’s clarify some of those concerns. Read on for those questions and their corresponding answers.
Picture this Scenario
You already have an overall cloud strategy. A cloud services vendor for your server VMs is a great start. You should look into reducing the amount of maintenance required with services that are otherwise available as PaaS and SaaS.
Who‘s Already in the Cloud?
Every RPA vendor will tell you they are ”in the cloud”. What they mean could be far from accurate. To some being in the cloud means that you can install their platform into a server virtual machine (VM). This is something that most RPA vendors have been doing for years. If it runs on a physical server, it will run in a server virtualized somewhere. The real question is who has a Cloud-Native service.
OK, Who’s Offers a Cloud-Native RPA Platform?
When it comes to RPA and the state of RPA vendors with cloud services you don’t have too many choices. Of the modern and mature implementations, you can only list Automation Anywhere A2019 Cloud and Microsoft Power Automate as a distant second with a functionally basic service integrated into their mature Office 365 and Azure back-end.
Of all RPA vendors, Automation Anywhere is the only cloud-native platform as a service. Automation Anywhere has market-wide acceptance, is mature, and tried-and-tested in the RPA and cloud market. The two other major RPA vendors (UiPath and Blue Prism) do not have native cloud offerings. In their case, they propose users to install their platform on a server or server VM that can be in your cloud (same as Automation Anywhere A2019 OnPrem, and several of their previous versions).
With the non-native vendors, you need to maintain the OS, the database, and the platform itself. Whenever you have to update any component, it is up to you to do those. With a native RPA cloud vendor, you don’t need to worry about any maintenance. RPA cloud vendors take care of any maintenance for you and you can save time and effort.
So, Why Worry About Cloud RPA Services Integration?
Under our scenario, if you set up server-VMs with your cloud vendor, you would also configure all the networking, routing, firewall filtering, load balancing, and other networking components; virtual or otherwise. It is reasonable to think that you may need to do something on your networking settings to have your RPA cloud to work because under legacy RPA platforms you would have to do it.
Cloud RPA Services Integration Works Everywhere
However, as discussed in RPA Doesn’t Care Who Your Cloud Service Vendor Is you don’t need to do any changes in your settings because even though you have a cloud RPA platform, an agent needs to be running within your network to secure, encrypt, and facilitate communications with the cloud service. If you set up a cloud environment with authentication requirements to gain access to the outside world; you may need to create a networking route for your agent to reach Automation Anywhere’s cloud. This is something you can do with any cloud vendor. It doesn’t pose a particular risk towards your cloud compatibility.
Now that you understand how these services integrate, you can see that those will widely integrate with your data center, whether it’s on-prem, a co-location, private or public cloud. That also means that it doesn’t matter what cloud services vendor you have. Even if you are on the other end of the spectrum: when you use Azure and Automation Anywhere Cloud is hosted internally from AWS or if you are in AWS and you wanted to use Microsoft Power Automate. It will even work if you chose any of the two cloud RPA platforms and you are using Google Cloud or any other vendor.