AWS Partner Network (APN) Blog
Modernize Workforce Management Using Workday Human Capital Management for U.S. Federal Customers
By Vani Eswarappa, Principal Solutions Architect – AWS
By Gina Guillaume-Joseph, PhD, Chief Technology Officer, Government – Workday
By Sonal Nuckols, Principal Enterprise Architect, Federal Team – Workday
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The U.S. federal government is considered the most complex market in the United States, having to deliver on critical objectives in a vastly changing landscape. Agencies and departments face budget uncertainty and a variety of workforce issues, such as lengthy hiring and onboarding cycles, high turnover, and diversity disparity.
Federal government agencies must find new ways to boost efficiency, reduce costs, and better serve employees and citizens. Disparate finance and HR systems make it difficult to stay on top of it all, however, which is why many government agencies are moving to the cloud.
Workday is an AWS Partner and leading provider of enterprise cloud applications. It brings together finance, spend management, human capital management, payroll, grants, and analytics in a unified cloud-based system that’s flexible and easy to use.
Workday partners with more than 10,000 organizations across all sectors, including healthcare, financial services, retail, hospitality, education, and state and local government—often replacing legacy systems. Workday helps government agencies streamline and standardize administrative processes, gain visibility across the organization, and adapt to changes quickly.
In this post, you will learn about Workday Enterprise Management Platform on Amazon Web Services (AWS). We’ll dive into its multi-tenancy architecture on AWS and discuss innovative features such as scalability, high availability, seamless deployment with zero downtime on the cloud, flexible reporting, real-time monitoring capabilities, and a security and compliance offering tailored for public sector customers.
Workday Enterprise Management Cloud Platform
Workday delivers its enterprise applications on AWS infrastructure, which offers several advantages to public sector organizations. By utilizing Workday on AWS, customers gain the ability to seamlessly adapt to shifting workload demands. AWS’s inherent auto-scaling capabilities enable the infrastructure to dynamically expand or contract in response to customer usage patterns.
Workday on AWS also provides high availability and redundancy, providing uninterrupted access to critical functions even in the face of potential outages.
AWS further extends a comprehensive suite of security tools and services, encompassing fine-grained access controls, encryption both at rest and in transit, and adherence to data privacy regulations. By incorporating these robust security measures, Workday enhances the overall security posture for public sector customers, aligning with AWS best practices and promoting heightened security within the operational environment.
Figure 1 – Workday Enterprise Management coud platform.
The image above illustrates Workday Enterprise Management Cloud emphasizing its adaptability and ownership experience. The “True Cloud” concept ensures all customers are on the same version, receiving continuous innovation through weekly releases with zero downtime. Workday offers better customer support, service availability, and performance, leveraging the latest in hyperscale cloud and security technology.
The foundation of Workday’s system is the Intelligent Data Core, which integrates external enterprise data with Workday financial and people data to establish a reliable source of truth. This core comprises three key capabilities:
- Intelligent Data Pipeline: For ingesting and managing large-scale operational data.
- Object Management Services (OMS): Manages data relationships continuously, navigates between data objects, maintains lineage and time-travel, and recreates reality based on accurate data at any point in time
- Intelligent Data Services: For unique composite experiences in Workday applications. For example, error handling, enrichment and summarization are Intelligent Data Services powering Workday Accounting Center.
On top of the Intelligent Data Core, completely configurable frameworks allow secure activation of processes and access to user and data while allowing users to drive transactions, inform decisions, ensure compliance, and provide adaptable reporting.
Workday’s commitment to openness and interoperability with a broad IT ecosystem, enables it to be extended to address ever-changing business needs. This flexibility allows users to pair Workday’s applications with industry solutions and other cloud business applications for a modern, cloud-ready application architecture.
Finally, Workday enables users to thrive with a personalized, omnichannel experience tailored to their preferences, whether on the web, mobile, or digital workspaces. This fosters productivity and engagement, making Workday a comprehensive and user-friendly Enterprise Management Cloud solution.
Figure 2 – Workday Saas platform.
Workday Multi-Tenant SaaS Platform
Workday offers a multi-tenant software-as-a-service (SaaS) platform, enabling multiple customers to share one physical instance of the Workday system in a highly secure environment. The platform is built on microservice architecture using containers and allows individual services to be scaled independent of each other.
Leveraging Workday’s zero-downtime strategy, microservices allow for small, incremental updates. Workday delivers its software using a continuous development model, and builds that contain new features, bug fixes, or performance improvements are rolled out weekly.
Twice a year, Workday takes all the features put into preview and releases them to production for all customers. Workday customers are never locked in on an old release. All customers have access to new features and products to which they subscribed, as soon as they are live.
Multi-tenancy is enabled through the Workday Object Management Server (OMS), which provides tenant isolation so the worker from one tenant can’t access information from another tenant. Workday OMS is built using an in-memory database and the data is persisted to disk using storage services for backup purposes. These persistence services include Amazon Aurora for business data and for document storage, HDFS and Spark for big data, and Amazon Simple Storage Service (Amazon S3) for media content.
The business logic is insulated and independent of where the data is persisted. This approach provides a futuristic platform that’s open to change.
Workday Integration Services provide integration tools to synchronize the data stored within Workday with the many different systems and services used by our customers. These services run integrations developed by Workday partners and customers in a secure, isolated, and supervised environment. Many pre-built connectors are provided alongside a variety of data transformation technologies and transports for building custom integrations.
Workday’s UI Services support a wide variety of mobile and browser-based clients and are implemented in Java and Spring. Workday’s responsive user interface (UI) is rendered entirely in HTML5.
Security and Compliance Overview
With 10,000 customers on a single data platform, security is integrated into the Workday core. This includes encrypting customer data at rest and in transit, always-on auditing, multi-factor authentication (MFA), step-up authentication, role-based access, regulatory compliance updates, and more.
The Workday product suite is wrapped in a strong security layer built into the core with the Secure Software Development Lifecycle (SSDLC) framework by the National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST). Workday International Organization for Standardization (ISO) certifications validate adherence to global security standards, with policies designed to meet ISO controls. Workday’s System and Organization Controls (SOC) reports maintain strong security commitments and transparency.
Figure 3 – Workday compliance overview.
Workday Government Cloud is a FedRamp Moderate-authorized SaaS offering for U.S. federal, state, and local government customers, as well as U.S. government contractors and federally funded research and development centers (FFRDCs).
Workday has built 325 FedRamp controls into the platform for customers. The platform provides a baseline set of controls that are independently audited, and the results are made available via the customer’s portal. This provides ongoing transparency and visibility into operational effectiveness of the platform.
Workday Government Cloud is hosted using FedRAMP Authorized AWS services in the AWS U.S. region. It’s available to customers who need FedRAMP Moderate solutions, as it adheres to mandates and compliance regulations dictating that federal data should be located within the United States.
Conclusion
Workday delivers enterprise cloud applications that seamlessly integrate finance, HR, and planning. With a unified cloud-based system that prioritizes flexibility and user-friendliness, Workday collaborates with a diverse array of sectors and industries, revolutionizing administrative processes and driving adaptability.
The collaboration between Workday and AWS elevates security standards, exemplifying commitment to safeguarding customers’ sensitive data that aligns with AWS best practices. With Workday and AWS, public sector customers gain a powerful enterprise solution and environment that prioritizes resilience, scalability, and data security.
Learn more about Workday products and their purpose-built solutions for the public sector.
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Workday – AWS Partner Spotlight
Workday is an AWS Partner and leading provider of enterprise cloud applications. It brings together finance, spend management, human capital management, payroll, grants, and analytics in a unified cloud-based system that’s flexible and easy to use.