APAC Retrospective: Learnings from a Year of Tech Outages – Dismantling Knowledge Silos

Incidents are an unavoidable reality for organizations, particularly in the APAC region, where regulatory enforcement against service standard failures is rising, leading to severe penalties. Companies face challenges such as technical issues, cloud service interruptions, and cybersecurity vulnerabilities, necessitating a proactive approach to incident management. The blog discusses the "Automation Gap," where a lack of knowledge, skills, and access among on-call responders leads to reliance on a small group of senior engineers during incidents. This reliance creates bottlenecks due to the senior engineers' "tribal knowledge" and expertise. To address this, event-driven automation and orchestrated runbooks crafted by subject matter experts can empower responders with the necessary tools to manage incidents efficiently. While full auto-remediation of incidents is rare, automating diagnostics and providing contextual remediations can greatly enhance incident response time and effectiveness. This approach balances automation with human judgment, ensuring security and resilience, especially in regulated industries. The blog emphasizes the importance of dismantling knowledge silos and suggests a phased approach to automation, starting with diagnostics and progressing to auto-remediation for known, repeatable incidents. The series will continue to explore incident resolution and the decision-making processes involved in restoring services.