Business continuity planning is a necessary practice so your company can keep generating revenue, communicating with customers, or providing services. Without a mature continuity program in place, a range of possible incidents can render your organization unable to operate.

However, developing and operating a business continuity program is time-consuming and resource-intensive. As a result, many companies end up with blind spots and gaps throughout their programs that can be devastating in the long run.

Fortunately, the rise of AI has given birth to a wide range of new tools designed to help ensure business continuity and disaster recovery are more efficient and cost-effective.

A recent IBM study found that organizations that have adopted security AI save an average of US$1.76 million compared to organizations that don’t. That’s a significant benefit that makes exploring security AI well worth exploring to close gaps or enhance your business continuity programs.

So, let’s examine some of the main ways that embracing AI can close critical gaps and enhance your continuity and recovery programs.

Typical Gaps in Business Continuity Planning

Before we explore how AI can cover gaps in continuity planning, what gaps might you need to cover? Common gaps in disaster recovery include the following:

• Lacking detection and alerts: You need to know about an incident to start recovering from it, including keeping the business operational. A devastating gap in many programs is not having monitoring tools in place to even be aware of when a disaster has occurred.
• No backup communication channels: It’s entirely too common for businesses to overlook crisis communications when creating business continuity programs. You shouldn’t depend on the standard lines of communication that remain available.
• Missing qualified personnel or specialized software: Business continuity and disaster recovery is often a cross-departmental effort that requires subject matter experts and effective tools. Without the right people and platforms being readily available, your teams may struggle to recover.

While this is not an all-encompassing list, it helps showcase the complexity of disaster recovery programs and the potential value of using AI tools.

How AI Enhances Business Continuity and Disaster Recovery

Technology is shaping the future of cybersecurity, disaster recovery, and business continuity programs. While trained experts and other tools will almost certainly still be necessary, a new breed of AI tools can add tremendous value that keeps your business going.

So, we’ll explore a few ways we see AI changing the current and future ways businesses respond to disasters and ensure continuity.

Automated Incident Detection and Responses

Advanced automation and AI systems can effectively monitor vital systems throughout the IT ecosystem. Alerting admins when something goes down has been a standard practice for years, but AI can help take monitoring systems to the next level.

AI models excel at parsing a significant amount of data to identify patterns and deviations from them that might otherwise be overlooked. This utility means intrusion detection systems, for example, can become exceedingly effective in identifying anomalous network behavior. 

Regardless of the specific application, any tool that helps businesses understand when an incident has occurred is vital to ensuring business continuity.

Predictive Analytics for Proactive Planning

Predictive analytics is an exciting application of AI that will likely find organization-wide use cases. Disaster recovery and business continuity planning can benefit from this emerging field of AI.

How might predictive analytics be deployed to help businesses remain operational? If trained on a significant amount of data, the hypothetical platform may be able to predict the likelihood of a specific incident occurring based on your current IT ecosystem and processes.

The result would be proactive planning based on these projections, helping solve even more gaps before you discover them during a live incident. Having additional insights to guide business continuity planning can have immense returns in the long run.

Compliance and Regulatory Requirements

Many industries must meet compliance standards even when responding to a disaster. For example, you may need to alert customers, collect specific documentation, or involve legal experts.

AI tools can help parse complex compliance and regulatory requirements to find specific standards related to disaster recovery. From there, response plans can be designed with these rules in mind.

Additionally, it’s possible to have an AI tool that monitors specific actions taken by your team during disaster recovery to ensure all actions are properly documented and fully compliant. Leveraging AI to make compliance simpler is an exciting emerging field, and it can certainly help when recovering from a disaster.

Is Your Organization Disaster Ready?

Adopting AI where you can go far in enhancing business continuity and disaster recovery programs. The current and future state of secure AI tools can go far in keeping companies operational. 

However, you’ll still need trained personnel and other platforms to keep organizations operating. ShadowHQ is an industry-recognized leader in crisis communications. Our platform allows your teams to collaborate to ensure business continuity and recover from disasters securely. 

Can your business maintain business continuity during a disaster? Find out where your gaps exist by completing our disaster readiness checklist.