With data emerging as one of the most valuable assets for any business, organizations can’t afford to lose even a single megabyte of the information they collect.
Unfortunately, even in the most robust technical environments, there’s always a risk that something could go wrong.
While companies may not be able to prevent disasters from happening altogether, it is possible to take steps that will protect your organization and productivity in case the worst comes to pass.
That’s what disaster recovery and business continuity plans are for.
A business continuity plan ensures that no matter what happens in your company, from a flood in your data center to a security breach, you’re ready to get your venture back up and running in no time.
There are now new and improved ways of updating and enhancing your disaster recovery strategies with the use of artificial intelligence.
As intelligent tools become increasingly advanced, we’re discovering that artificial intelligence has the power to transform key business processes for the better.
Here’s what you need to know about the potential of AI in disaster recovery.
AI will help to predict potential outcomes
One of the biggest issues that companies face when it comes to disaster protection and prevention is that they’re not 100 percent sure what kind of risks they’re going to face.
Although you can evaluate your marketplace and draw conclusions from the data sets you have access to, there’s always a risk that you’re going to miss a potential threat during your analysis.
On the other hand, artificial intelligence can examine data sets with much higher accuracy than we can manage as humans.
Artificial intelligence tools use technologies such as deep neural networks to find potential risks and threats that never would have occurred to us, humans.
This makes it easier for your AI system to determine what kind of threats you need to protect yourself against, so you can develop a more powerful and robust plan for disaster prevention and recovery.
Using predictive analytics, your artificial intelligence system may even be able to determine ahead of time when it’s likely that a process or system will fail. It will suggest precautionary measures that you can take to prevent a disaster.
AI can offer insights into better protection
Many of today’s businesses are exploring the many benefits that artificial intelligence has to offer when it comes to strengthening various forms of security.
For instance, in a business environment, an AI-enhanced plan could help planners to make better decisions on how to prepare for disaster prevention and recovery.
AI could use business impact analysis and risk assessment to help you see which parts of your company need better protection, and which you can accord to put less investment into.
AI is much better at analyzing huge amounts of data than we are.
When you feed a machine learning system the right amount of information, it can come back to you with useful insights that may make your disaster recovery strategies more effective.
For instance, your system could analyze all the previous periods of downtime you’ve had, and let you know that your biggest cause of breakdowns is overheating in your manufacturing room, or errors with data uploads.
The more you know, the easier it is to implement strategies that make a real difference to your company’s performance.
AI can automate disaster recovery
One excellent feature of artificial intelligence is its ability to support automation in your business. You can use AI to control robots in factories and maintain ideal operations among connected machines. It can be used to automate various parts of your disaster protection and business continuity plan.
The earlier mentioned predictive analysis can recognize when your systems might start experiencing issues that may have previously led to downtime and other problems.
An AI component in an automated system could instantly notice an impending problem before it happens and put automated measures in place to protect against that issue.
You could stop disasters in their tracks, keeping your unplanned downtime to a minimum.
What’s more, as your AI continues to protect you against issues, it will also continue to learn from new data, making its predictive analysis more effective.
AI improves incident response actions
Usually, in the immediate aftermath of a business disaster, it takes time to evaluate the event, determine the severity of the problem, then make decisions about what to do next to get your business back up and running.
You might even need to use your valuable time on figuring out what caused the fault in the first place.
Artificial intelligence can eliminate these actions as it will already know the cause of the fault. Not only is it able to determine the cause, your AI-based system can be programmed to automatically initiate recovery activities when problems occur.
This could mean that your system reaches out to your cloud-based backup systems and gathers data for recovery, or initiates system failover activities. With an AI strategy in place to begin your response to a disaster as quickly as possible, your amount of unplanned downtime could be reduced to virtually nothing.
AI learns from each incident
Finally, many artificial intelligence systems designed for disaster recovery and business continuity purposes are equipped with machine learning mechanisms.
AI systems learn from every interaction they have with an incident and their environment.
Over time, the more your AI systems are exposed to data about the things that cause your downtime and outages, the more they’ll be able to pinpoint and register the initial issues that led to downtime previously.
Your tools quickly become a lot better are predicting potential downtime and protecting you from problems in the future. AI-based disaster recovery and business continuity plans actually get better over time, rather than growing outdated as your business continues to evolve.
Make your business recovery strategy smarter
Ultimately, in a world where any amount of downtime can seriously harm your company’s performance, today’s brands can’t afford to have limited, outdated, or less-than-perfect recovery strategies.
With artificial intelligence, your company can take your disaster management plans to the next level, and make sure that you’re ready for anything.