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ZDNET's key takeaways
Greater operational resilience demands significant advances in automation.
Manual processes are the enemy of efficiency and cost-effectiveness.
Troubleshooting, communication, and mitigation will be handled by AI agents.
From IT outages to global crises, modern organizations increasingly require rapid, reliable response and recovery capabilities to keep their digital operations running and their people safe. To a great degree, ever-higher expectations for operational resilience must be met by significant advances in automation -- which leading solution providers are making possible by AI and machine learning.
That's the core takeaway from a 30-minute podcast-style video chat I had the pleasure of participating in. The chat was hosted by my colleague Jeff Grettler, head brand ambassador at Spiceworks Ziff Davis. Alongside me was Sean Rousseau, senior manager of product management at xMatters, an Everbridge company. Sean and I dove deeper into how the latest AI-powered incident management tools can help restore continuity from the chaos of unplanned disruptions.
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This conversation is for you if you're a technical professional (particularly in IT, Cybersecurity, or DevOps). Check out a few of the key points below, then find half an hour to watch the full video.
A stronger focus on resilience
I kicked things off by noting a stronger market focus on resilience, in three dimensions: operational resilience (technologies, business processes), personal resilience (people), and business resilience (strategic
outcomes).
Recent research findings show companies are ramping up their investments in capabilities to detect, respond, and recover to complement their capabilities to identify, protect, and govern (acknowledgment of the six
verbs of NIST CSF 2.0). Today, the stakes of continuity are higher than ever: Disruptions are more frequent, and the corresponding business impact is amplified.
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Sean jumped in to frame Everbridge's vision, emphasizing their High Velocity Critical Event Management (CEM) platform, powered by AI. Amid rising threats, it's designed to help organizations "know earlier, respond faster, and improve continuously."
The xMatters platform integrates with this, focusing on the digital ops side. As Sean put it, xMatters automates the entire incident lifecycle -- from detection to resolution -- slashing both the time and the total cost of resolution. Imagine seamless integrations with your ITSM or DevOps tools, combined with purpose-built AI that enriches signals with context, and automated workflows that lower mean time to acknowledge (MTTA) and mean time to resolve (MTTR).
AI and automation as the means to resilience
The real key? Automation. Sean stressed that true resilience comes from automating IT incident responses alongside business continuity plans. Without integration and automation, manual processes are the enemy of efficiency and cost-effectiveness.
This raised the natural question: If automation is the end (the "what"), what are the means (the "how")?
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Sean explained how advanced technologies like AI and machine learning are essential engines driving this automation. xMatters offers native process automation in a single platform, handling everything from issue detection to resolution. Its AI-driven service intelligence automates the next steps, enriches signals with external data for full context, and even enables auto-resolution where possible. xMatters believes its low-code, user-friendly design is perfect for scaling, without ballooning complexity or costs.
With AI agents on the horizon, Sean painted a future where incident commanders oversee rather than micromanage, as bots handle troubleshooting, communication, and mitigation. This is the next evolution in making resilience a superpower for complex IT environments, complete with no-code flow designers and AIOps for proactive threat hunting.
From risk management to strategic enablement
In my view, no tech talk is complete without tying it back to fundamental business outcomes, of which I assert there are primarily three:
Managing downside risks to an acceptable level (cost avoidance). Increasing operational efficiencies (cost savings, time and money) via automation. Supporting the achievement of upside opportunities (enable strategic objectives).
It's not all that common for a solution provider to tick the boxes on all three of these high-level outcomes, but Sean pointed out how xMatters and Everbridge hit the "business outcomes trifecta" by delivering on all of them:
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On risks: xMatters slashes the time it takes to identify and assemble the right resolution teams, accelerating the time to resolution and reducing the total business impact.
xMatters slashes the time it takes to identify and assemble the right resolution teams, accelerating the time to resolution and reducing the total business impact. On efficiencies : Automation handles unglamorous tasks like ticket creation, on-call scheduling, and stakeholder communications, freeing teams up for higher-value tasks.
: Automation handles unglamorous tasks like ticket creation, on-call scheduling, and stakeholder communications, freeing teams up for higher-value tasks. On upside opportunities: Faster resolutions mean tech pros have more opportunities to innovate instead of firefighting, accelerating initiatives to transform digital operations and deliver new capabilities for customers.
Watch the full conversation
Summaries like these only scratch the surface -- the full video captures the back-and-forth energy, subtle nuances, and those "aha" moments that could influence your approach to incident management and event management in 2025. If you're serious about unlocking your operational resilience, you can watch it here.
Derek E. Brink, CISSP, is vice president and research fellow with Aberdeen Strategy & Research (a division of Spiceworks Ziff Davis).