Leveraging Automation for Business Continuity Planning

In the modern business landscape, organizations face countless challenges that can disrupt their day-to-day operations and impact their ability to deliver products and services to clients. These events can range from natural disasters to cyber-attacks, pandemics, and other unforeseen events. Successful business continuity and disaster recovery planning (BCDR) involve determining potential risks, developing response plans, and testing to ensure they work effectively. A key strategy for improving the effectiveness and efficiency of business continuity planning is to leverage automation.

In this week’s blog article, let’s explore how your organization can use automation to its advantage to better secure your environment.

Incident detection and alerting

Businesses should explore implementing automated monitoring tools. These tools can be used to detect potential incidents, such as system or network outages, security incidents, or natural disasters. After detection, automation can trigger alerts to relevant stakeholders so they can immediately begin initiating response plans before the incident causes significant damage.

Last year, IBM reported that AI can now correlate events, add context to outages, guide IT, workers, to automated repair strategies, and predict and resolve incidents before they occur.

Predictive analytics

Machine learning algorithms through automation can analyze historical data from previous incidents to identify trends and patterns that may be indicative of future disruptions. For example, a function of machine learning and automation tools is to predict the likelihood of a natural disaster occurring in a particular location or the likelihood of a cyber-attack targeting a particular system. Organizations can then take this information and prepare to take proactive measures to minimize the impact of such events.

Automated decision-making – when it comes to business continuity plans

Automation and algorithms can also be used to automate decision-making processes in the context of a business continuity plan. As an example, these tools can be used to automatically trigger failover processes in the event of a system outage or to initiate backup and recovery processes in the event of data loss. This is by no-means a replacement for human experience, but rather to supplement and provide additional support to organizations as the sophistication of attacks continues to grow.

Post-event analysis

Lastly, a function of these automation algorithms is to examine data collected during and after a disruption to identify areas where the response could be improved. This information can then be used by your organization’s team to refine business continuity plans and processes and improve the overall resilience of the business.

Overall, automation can be a powerful tool for improving business continuity. No matter the size, organizations cannot afford to be non-operational, even for a couple of hours. Automation of key processes allows organizations to respond more quickly and effectively to incidents, which in turn reduces the impact of an attack on operations. However, it is important to note that automation should be used to supplement existing processes, and not relied solely on.

If you would like to read more about AI and its impact on businesses with the evolution of generative software, check out our blog from last month or watch our video below.