Orchestration vs Automation: What’s the Difference?
Key takeaways:
Automation handles routine tasks, while orchestration coordinates how those tasks work together. Learn the differences between orchestration vs automation, how they apply to cloud environments, and why businesses need both to streamline complex processes.
The pressure is on: customers are now in the driver’s seat, steering businesses into a new era, one that revolves around frictionless, user-friendly customer experiences. As businesses race to keep up with the groundswell of discerning customer expectations, they’re adopting an ensemble of technologies that involve a variety of apps, tools, and cloud platforms.
Smart companies are turning to process orchestration and automation to simplify and streamline their increasingly complex ecosystems of technology. While at first glance the techniques seem interchangeable, they’re two distinct practices, both critical to a customer-pleasing digital transformation.
The difference between orchestration vs automation comes down to how work gets done—automation performs defined tasks, while orchestration coordinates those tasks across a larger process.
What is process automation?
Process automation enlists technology to perform defined tasks or workflows with minimal human intervention. Automation releases your team from the productivity-draining shackles of routine, manual tasks and shifts the responsibility over to a machine. Businesses use automation to execute tasks like:
Routing a loan application to senior management for approval
Compiling email addresses from a self-service account opening app into a marketing database
Transferring customer information from a CRM into a final contract
Sending a white paper after a customer submits an online form
Provisioning virtual servers as traffic and usage increases
Automation frees up time for your staff to focus on more valuable tasks like strategic planning, or clears their workspace so they can lend their brain power to the tougher, more unpredictable cases that fall outside of the routine-based skill set of automation.
While stacking your workflow with automations can propel productivity to new heights, it is not something you can do with wanton abandon. It requires a new strategy to monitor and govern how these automations fit into your ecosystem at-large.
What is process orchestration?
Businesses can have dozens, hundreds, if not thousands, of automations whirring through their systems, but how do these automations cooperate with one another?
While automation is the tactic used to get things done, process orchestration is the strategy that governs their coordinated execution. It strings together automations operating in disparate environments, along with the business rules, decisions, and human tasks needed to keep work moving.
Think of orchestration as the train conductor: it links the cars, or automated tasks, together, sets the route, keeps everything moving at the right speed, and enables communication between them.
This coordination helps businesses:
Sequence events: Identify dependencies so tasks happen in the right order.
Eliminate redundancies: Connect workflows so shared work doesn’t need to happen twice.
Apply consistent rules: Coordinate approvals, policies, and exception handling across connected processes.
For a broader look at how these capabilities relate to to BPM, integration, and other automation technologies, explore our field guide.
How does this apply to cloud automation and orchestration?
The same distinction applies to cloud environments. Cloud automation performs tasks such as provisioning resources, running backups, and installing patches. Cloud orchestration coordinates those tasks across services and systems.
Take backups. An automation can run a scheduled backup. Orchestration can coordinate the sequence of backup jobs, check completion, and route failures for attention.
Patching follows the same pattern. Automation can install an approved update. Orchestration coordinates the maintenance window, required approvals, system dependencies, and checks afterward.
In both cases, automation handles the action. Orchestration manages the steps around it so teams aren’t left connecting the dots manually.
How process orchestration and automation fit together
Automation helps remove manual tasks that bog down your customer experience, while orchestration brings the moving parts together into a well-oiled, systematic engine. Working hand in hand, they can deliver significant benefits.
Cost savings: A fuller view of your processes helps uncover duplicate work and unnecessary resource costs. In cloud environments, automation and orchestration can also coordinate resource scaling to better match capacity with demand.
More consistently governed processes: Updating policies separately across every app and workflow creates opportunities for inconsistency. Orchestration helps apply shared business rules and coordinate approvals across connected processes, while automation carries out the defined actions.
Increased agility: Businesses constantly push to increase their time-to-market. Automation and orchestration make it easier to connect services, adapt workflows, and introduce new capabilities without managing every handoff manually.
Bringing the moving parts together
As customers demand more from the businesses they work with, the technologies behind these interactions become an increasingly complex puzzle. The dynamic duo of automation and orchestration helps your organization coordinate that technology to better serve customers.
Automation gets individual pieces of work done. Orchestration makes sure those pieces work together.
Explore the Decisions orchestration platform to see how workflows, business rules, integrations, and human review come together across end-to-end business processes.
Frequently Asked Questions
What is the difference between orchestration and automation?+−
Automation performs defined tasks or workflows with minimal manual intervention. Orchestration coordinates those activities across systems, decisions, and people to complete a larger process.
Does orchestration replace automation?+−
No. Orchestration connects automated activities into a broader process. It can also coordinate human tasks, including approvals and exception reviews.
When does a business need orchestration?+−
Orchestration becomes useful when work depends on multiple automations, systems, or teams. Repeated manual handoffs, disconnected approvals, and difficulty tracking where work has stopped are signs that those activities need better coordination.
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