How to Improve Your Disaster Recovery Processes with Automation

Resilience has become an essential quality for most of us. The Harvard Business Review even named resilience as one of the key differences between successful and unsuccessful people, defining the term as simply the ability to bounce back from setbacks. But resilience is not a skill or characteristic that only individuals need to cultivate—organizations need it, too.

What’s more, given the accelerating pace of disruptions—economic, climate, and otherwise—to our lives and businesses, resilience isn’t the only thing organizations need in their operational toolkit. When a major disaster strikes, things change, and they change fast. The best way to prepare for unexpected scenarios is to plan.

Planning for continuity

In 2022, the U.S. sustained 15 weather- and climate change-related disasters where costs exceeded $1 billion, following 20 that occurred in 2021, according to the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Association. As with climate-related disasters, cyber attacks are increasing each year in frequency, sophistication, and cost.

Today’s businesses need modern business continuity plans. Gartner Research defines “disaster recovery” simply as “the methods and procedures for returning a data center to full operation after a catastrophic interruption.” And while the definition may be simple, the plan itself can be highly complex.

A business continuity plan should include emergency contacts, outline procedures for operating offline, secure data, and provide a clear roadmap of what to do when disaster strikes. It’s imperative to keep systems operational in the face of a disaster, whether it affects data, hardware, physical structures, or all of the above.

If your organization still relies on people and manual workflows for your disaster recovery plan, however, you’re at a disadvantage. Whether you’re a bank, credit union, or insurance company, financial services organizations of all stripes need a robust business continuity plan that can run as close to automatically as possible when the unexpected occurs.

A growing number of organizations are implementing workload automation to provide this level of continuity during a catastrophic event.

Why use workload automation for disaster recovery?

Workload automation allows businesses to automate complicated workflows related to processes like document imaging and storage, digital banking, and business intelligence. It also provides a highly effective solution for automating your disaster recovery plan.

Workload automation frees up your staff from doing manual, repetitive, and error-prone tasks. As a result, your employees can be redeployed to more strategic work that will deliver more value to your organization. This boosts morale as employees can focus on more fulfilling tasks that are directly tied to their organization’s strategic initiatives. In this labor market, that’s especially critical.

While there are other automation tools available, what’s unique about workload automation, at least when it comes to the more robust WLA platforms, is its ability to orchestrate complex business processes across APIs and operating systems, enabling automated error resolution and coordination independent of location and time zones. A workload automation tool should be platform agnostic. The most robust—and therefore most essential—workload automation solutions operate seamlessly across complex IT environments, which is essential when it comes to disaster recovery.

How does workload automation provide business continuity?

Without workload automation, disaster recovery efforts require a team of experts to spend an inordinate amount of time troubleshooting and problem-solving. Data can be lost, operations can be interrupted, and human errors are likely to occur. Plus, when disaster recovery processes are dependent on individual staff members to execute, you face major risks if those specific people aren’t available when a crisis happens.

When you have an automated disaster recovery process in place, you avoid prolonged downtime, expediting the processes necessary to resume normal operations. Data is protected and service interruptions are minimized. It’s a time-saving approach when time is of the essence.

If disaster strikes, a workload automation solution can:

• Bring down the core database to ensure that it’s completely offline
• Bring the replicated database online at the secondary site
• Enable all services needed by employees and members
• Initiate the failover process and make sure all journals are in sync

Providing business continuity during a disaster increases brand trust, which is a crucial component of member and customer loyalty. Moreover, business continuity and disaster recovery processes are immune to employee turnover and can be preserved and executed irrespective of staff availability.

Workload automation can also automatically inform your IT staff of changes in response to the disaster, while retaining vital information and IT assets during an outage or system failure. Automation also mitigates the risk of human error, which can be exacerbated in stressful situations.

Case in point: VyStar Credit Union

Take, for example, VyStar Credit Union, based in Jacksonville, Florida. Before implementing workload automation, VyStar’s failover process took around 2.5 hours to execute, requiring more than 150 manual steps. This inefficiency left the organization vulnerable to unacceptable consequences, such as being unable to serve its 500,000+ members during downtime, coupled with the risk of human error if processes needed to be executed manually and under duress.

Once VyStar implemented OpCon, SMA Technologies’ workload automation solution, disaster recovery could be initiated at the Credit Union through a single step. OpCon automates 95% of their failover process, flawlessly handling all the required steps while alleviating the burden on IT and eliminating the risk of human error. With OpCon, the Credit Union’s failover time was reduced by 40%, and its core database is now protected from possible corruption.

“We eliminated both the human error and human stress levels associated with a manual failover process,” says Alex Castanheira, Systems Administrator at VyStar.

Preparation yields tangible results

The financial services industry is built around the concept of planning. Insurance companies help their policyholders plan for the unexpected. Banks and credit unions assist members and customers with their financial planning. When it comes to business continuity, workload automation can be a critical planning tool for financial institutions, allowing them to prepare for the unexpected. So, if and when disaster strikes, you have a streamlined, secure, and reliable plan in place.