Three Ways to Reduce Downtime for Resilient Automation

In the IT world, interruptions are inevitable. Downtime can be caused by everything from power failures to network connectivity issues, and even resource constraints. And while these interruptions may seem like minor inconveniences at first, if a critical task’s failure isn’t swiftly dealt with, it can lead to bigger, costlier problems.

With the right features, an automation tool—like robotic process automation (RPA)—not only takes the burden of manual tasks off your plate, but can take away the burden of downtime. These features take into consideration the common interruptions that your IT team could encounter, utilizing self-healing capabilities.

Here are three ways to build resilient automation that reduces downtime:

1. Ensure Proactive Error Handling

In automation, scheduling a task to occur regularly and ensuring its successful execution are two distinct challenges. And a good automation tool can solve both problems. In many cases, process failures can be resolved through automated retries and recovery tasks to enable self-healing, and ensure valuable time isn’t diverted from higher priority projects.

Proactive error handling allows workflows to handle a known oddity or miscellaneous condition in a self-healing matter. By default, automated tasks will fail if any step fails. But that doesn’t mean you can’t anticipate an error, and the way to handle it.

Let's say you have a task that requires accessing a website or an FTP site. And this particular site is prone to failure for whatever reason. When building your automated task, you can program a retry loop to try connecting again, and if it still won’t connect, send an immediate alert for troubleshooting. You can also build your automation to bypass specific errors. So, when an exception occurs on a statement, you can choose to run selected steps, stop the task, break out of a loop, or simply jump to a selected point in the task to carry on.

2. Employ a High Availability Environment

Any downtime can be costly and reduce revenue. This is why many organizations choose to safeguard their automation environments with high availability. Preventing outages and failures is critical to your business goals, especially when your automation tool handles critical tasks that aren’t easily replaced by manual tasks. Or you don’t have enough hands on deck to manually take over a down process.

Employing a high availability (HA) environment is the best way to prevent downtime. The basic concept of HA is a design and implementation approach that ensures a software system stays available to its users even when there are hardware or software problems. HA environments act as a generator to avoid unnecessary and costly downtime in the event of a network outage or server failure.

Part of an HA environment can include failover support. This allows your automation environment to automatically failover to a standby system, so your tasks and workflows are executed reliably, no matter what. When an environment fails or is unresponsive, your failover environment becomes active and assumes managing all of the tasks the primary environment had, ensuring all processes continue to run. Then when the original system is back up, everything switches back seamlessly.

3. Utilize a Test Environment

A test environment—also known as a non-production (or non-prod) environment—is a separate environment where you can test out your automation without interrupting production. Testing workflows in a non-prod environment can help avoid errors, bugs, crashes, and other disruptions to your automation. Want to play around with a workflow and try a crazy new idea? A test environment gives you the guardrails to get creative when building automation, so experimenting with your workflows won’t cause problems for what’s currently running.

When building multi-step, multi-platform automated workflows, a test environment gives you the ability to test tasks, dependencies, notifications, and other variables to ensure everything is executing correctly. And when you want to integrate a new task into a workflow, a testing environment lets you check what is affected downstream to ensure everything is running smoothly and ready for production.

Test environments are also great when implementing new applications to your tech stack. Instead of integrating a new application with your automation tool and hoping for the best, you can first set them up in a test environment to work out any problems, like the integration or timing of tasks. Allowing those to run in your test environment before putting them into production lets you get more familiar with the application, the individual tasks and dependencies within that application, or with other tasks and applications that might interact with your new tools. All without risking downtime in your production environment.

Building Resilient Automation

Putting these three practices in action builds resilient automation that lets your team stay focused on the most critical issues. Enabling your automation tool to handle routine resolutions, prevent outages, and provide the space to test new automation, can deliver less downtime and more peace of mind that your critical processes are running reliably.