Enterprise Lessons Learned from Large-Scale Automation Failures and Recoveries
DOI:
https://doi.org/10.63282/3050-9246.IJETCSIT-V7I1P123Keywords:
Automation Failure, Enterprise IT, CI/CD, Incident Management, Infrastructure as Code, Devops, Human Error, Rollback Strategy, Resilience Engineering, Site ReliabilityAbstract
Automation plays a pivotal role in modern IT ecosystems, facilitating scalable deployment, consistent configuration, and rapid delivery across complex environments. However, the very scale and speed it enables can also exacerbate failures when misconfigured. This study investigates three enterprise-scale automation incidents across industries e-commerce, software-as-a-service (SaaS), and fintech and synthesizes cross-case insights to guide future implementation. We analyze the sociotechnical root causes, including human oversight, environment misconfiguration, and insufficient guardrails, and propose a set of resilience strategies backed by both qualitative case data and academic literature. The study underscores the importance of environmental isolation, access control, observability, and recovery planning in preventing and containing failures. Findings are intended to support IT professionals, site reliability engineers, and organizational leaders in building more fault-tolerant automation systems.
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