• Minimizing failed changes to IT infrastructure. Intelligent automation helps ensure consistency of the change process, resulting in a dramatic reduction in the number of change failures and preventing many unnecessary outages. Intelligent automation also increases the speed and efficiency of the change process, freeing valuable time for highly skilled IT staff. Also, if a change does not produce the expected result, the solution can back out the change. It can also maintain an audit trail of the process to support regulatory compliance.
• Maintaining service quality as conditions change. Intelligent automation enables staff to quickly address problems, eliminating the "think time" associated with manual problem diagnosis and resolution. It leverages system-monitoring tools, keeping a close watch on the environment and responding automatically and immediately to out-of-threshold conditions. Response is intelligent and based on policy and business impact. With intelligent automation, the IT staff can also move proactively to head off problems before system outages occur or performance degrades.
• Detecting and eliminating contaminated data. Traditional approaches to prevent data loss, such as backup, recovery and data mirroring, do not ensure business continuity in the case of contaminated data. They simply create copies of the contaminated data, perpetuating the problem. Although applications remain in operation, they are now operating with bad data. Intelligent automation permits IT staff to quickly identify and back out the contaminated data from the database, and exclude it from the backup process.
• Preserving skills of experienced mainframe personnel. Intelligent automation eliminates mundane, day-to-day, repetitive tasks that soak up much of the mainframe operations staff's valuable time. It provides automated, preprogrammed responses to problems to ensure successful resolutions without requiring IT staff intervention. In addition, intelligent automation preserves the knowledge of mainframe specialists by encapsulating this knowledge into software-driven intelligent automation routines.
• Ensuring successful and speedy recovery from disasters. Intelligent automation can augment in-place disaster recovery mechanisms to automatically synchronize the recovery process with the correct sequence. By doing so, intelligent automation speeds the recovery process, and it ensures success by enforcing the correct recovery sequence. Intelligent automation also can base the recovery sequence on business priorities, recovering the most business-critical systems first.

Part of a Broader Solution

It's important to implement a business continuity solution that addresses the entire IT infrastructure, including distributed components, and not just the mainframe. Generally, this can be accomplished in the context of a broader business service management (BSM) strategy.

BSM strategy is based on enabling enterprises to align IT with important business goals. BSM solutions permit IT to make decisions, including intelligent automation decisions, based on their business impact. By implementing a business continuity solution in view of the broader BSM strategy, IT can maximize its contribution to business value. To do so requires a solution that is capable of associating the IT infrastructure components with the business services they support—for example, by indicating which servers and databases support which applications.