No company is immune from the challenges posed by the near-constant digital disruptions in its markets. Despite their wealth of customer knowledge, history, and accumulated brand power, established businesses often struggle to compete in a world driven by customers’ almost unlimited access to information, buying channels, and brand influencers.
The size and longevity of these businesses can turn against them when their data and customer knowledge is siloed across a highly complex web of applications, data, and infrastructure, making it difficult to unlock useful insights and get applications into production to drive business modernization and innovation and deliver new digital business outcomes.
To achieve the agility needed to gain actionable insights and customer centricity, and modernize their business, organizations must give their decentralized digital product and data engineering teams easy access to an end-to-end orchestration framework. And that framework must deliver complex application and data pipeline workflows in production with reliability, scalability, security, and compliance built in.
That’s why I’m excited to announce that BMC is enhancing freedom within the orchestration framework with Control-M 21.1!
This latest release introduces new features to help IT operations (IT Ops) teams continually adopt more modern technologies, and address the challenges of the market, by:
- Expanding the orchestration framework
- Increasing operational efficiency
- Improving self-service and collaboration
Expanding the Orchestration Framework
Control-M 21.1 helps organizations speed up their modernizations efforts by delivering data-driven business outcomes faster. Together with continuously delivered integrations, it offers new cloud, data, and machine learning integrations. It also enhances capabilities of Application Integrator.
New features include:
- Oracle Cloud Storage integration—The number of cloud storage providers that are natively supported has been increased to include Oracle Cloud Infrastructure Object Storage, so IT Ops teams, data teams, and cloud engineers can now transfer files to and from it, facilitating the orchestration of modern workflows.
- Improved database native plugin capabilities—The database plugin will now support the Java Database Connectivity (JDBC) driver with Transport Layer Security (TLS) 1.2/1.3 encryption and new editions of Microsoft SQL and SAP® Adaptive Server Enterprise. It will be decoupled from the Application Pack for easy deployment.
- New integrations—Control-M 21.1, together with continuously delivered integrations, expands the orchestration framework by natively connecting new data, cloud, and machine learning applications. In addition, it expands existing integration capabilities to allow users to leverage new application versions and functionalities
- Enhanced Application Integrator Control-M Application Integrator can now track job status after a manual abort operation and retrieve output for a step that is still executing, providing more precise monitoring of custom integrations.
Increased Efficiency, Security, and Optimization
Control-M 21.1 improves operational efficiency with new features that allow IT Ops, data teams, and cloud engineers to accelerate business outcomes, comply with regulations and security standards, and enhance overall performance, including:
- Expanded Manage File Transfer and capabilities—Users can now transfer multiple files simultaneously, enable server-side encryption at rest when transferring files to and from Google Cloud Storage and Amazon Web Services (AWS) S3, and use Secure Shell (SSH) public-key authentication.
- Expanded Managed File Transfer/Enterprise capabilities: Managed File Transfer/Enterprise administrators can now assign default home folders for individual external users, grant external users specific access-level permissions to folders and subfolders, and even delegate folder management to external users. This helps organizations protect external partner data from unauthorized access and ensure compliance with established business processes. Administrators will also be able to better filter, block, and control access based on IP addresses.
- New Workflow Insights dashboard—Workflow Insights users have access to a new dashboard that provides detailed visibility into user actions to elevate automation and reduce human interaction. The dashboard details the top 10 user actions, and provides insights into user actions by client type (AAPI, web, desktop) and by application, sub-application, host, and more.
Improved User Experience
Control-M 21.1 provides non-IT users with greater freedom and an improved self-service experience through enhancements that shorten learning curves and improve productivity. IT Ops can also refine the framework boundaries with new granular access controls.
New features include:
- Expanded web interface—The Control-M web interface has been expanded to include capabilities such as job templates, workload policy, change history, folder timeline view, variable simulation, and more. These features give non-IT users more freedom and control to access, manage, and report on their workflows.
- Web interface enhancements—In addition to the new features, the web interface has been enhanced for faster navigation. A new application menu allows users to separate application areas for a narrower focus, and the search bar offers direct search capabilities against the support center. In addition, users can now right-click to perform in-context actions as well as define workflow links by setting the event source, event target, and much more.
- Additional access control options—When defining user roles, IT Ops can add role-based controls to history reports and service level agreement (SLA) management report objects.
Remaining agile could make the difference between succeeding and being left behind. Control-M 21.1 can help you expand your orchestration framework; increase security, efficiency, and optimization; and improve the experience of your users inside and outside the business.
For more information about Control-M 21.1, check out the release notes and the “what’s new” section to see a complete list of features.
