Regulated Environments
Process automation, for incident response and remediation as well as other IT services, can be of particular benefit to teams in regulated environments. Well-written automation that is maintained in a source code repository provides a concrete, auditable history of actions performed on production systems.
Additionally, it can provide a laundry list of permitted actions that can be limited to specific activities in programmatic ways. Codifying permitted commands into automation and scripts provides a secure way for teams to delegate specific activities to other personnel without risking giving away too many privileges.
Tip
One customer use case is a situation where they have a particular app that costs them between £500k-£750k for every hour of downtime, and for this app is to just reboot the server. With internal processes and approvals, it can take an hour to get the correct permissions to take the reboot action. After creating automation to run the reboot and getting approval for that automation for the issue, they are able to restart the service automatically within a few seconds of the error surfacing.
Teams benefit from creating automation that can be peer-reviewed, unit tested, and approved in advance of it being needed during an incident. Automation can benefit the day-to-day functions of complex systems, as well as improving response to incidents by creating safe pathways for non-experts to get work done effectively.