Workday CTO: 3 Critical Factors For Delivering Business Continuity at Scale

Agility, reliability, and configurability are the core of continuous enterprise cloud service delivery. Our Global CTO Dave Sohigian discusses how incorporating these concepts supports our customers’ ability to remain adaptable during periods of growth and change.

The ability to handle both rapid growth and unexpected disruptions as seamlessly as possible is vital to every business.

That’s why, as an enterprise management cloud provider, delivering business continuity at scale has always been a major priority for Workday. We provide tools companies need to react to change and innovate quickly.

At Conversations for a Changing World, a Workday digital event, Dave Sohigian, our global CTO, shared how we continue to live up to our scalability commitments—even as we continue to experience major growth. The number of our customers’ enterprise transactions—from running payroll to committing to a benefit plan—inside the Workday Enterprise Management Cloud increased by 34% in 2021 to 265 billion transactions. 

For our customers, the ability to handle growth without major disruptions comes down to three key factors, starting with being agile, Sohigian said.

Agility allows companies to adapt and change over time to create what’s needed in the future, he said. One way Workday supports our customers’ agility is via the more than 600 prebuilt templates we provide for integrations via the Workday Integration Cloud. Our customers, meanwhile, have created more than 210,000 integrations on their own or with the help of consultants.

Delivering business continuity at scale has always been a major priority for Workday.

Another factor that’s essential for Workday’s delivery of continuity at scale is reliability, said Sohigian. The Workday service-level agreement (SLA) promises 99.7% system uptime outside of maintenance windows.

“This guarantee is about any event that makes it so the service is not available,” Sohigian said. “If it is inside our data centers, we’re going to take responsibility for it.”

The third factor Sohigian discussed was the importance of a system that’s configurable—meaning you can rapidly innovate without running into problems caused by complex customizations and upgrades. 

“With legacy systems, this is often very difficult,” he said. “And the reason why is because they have these potholes in the road of trying to move down the innovation highway. You have to go through an upgrade to be able to get the benefit of that new innovation.”

Rather than creating that challenge, Sohigian said the mindset at Workday is: “What if you could just remove the potholes altogether and have these updates happen so seamlessly that they don’t disrupt your operations?”

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