Hyper Automation is a modern business strategy that helps organizations thrive in the digital world.
It’s valuable, especially for large businesses with plenty of tasks, processes, people, departments, data storage, and systems to manage. Automating processes saves time and costs, optimizes operations, and brings better business outcomes.
This is why many organizations are embracing hyper automation and integrating tools and technologies like AI, ML, RPA, computer vision, cybersecurity solutions, and more.
If you are looking to implement hyper-automation in your organization, this in-depth article will guide you. It will cover hyper automation in detail, its benefits and use cases, and step-by-step implementation.
What Is Hyper Automation?
Hyper Automation is a business approach to automating and streamlining as many automatable tasks and processes as possible in an organization using advanced technologies, such as:
- Artificial intelligence (AI) and machine learning (ML) tools like chatbots, image recognition tools, computer vision, virtual agents, etc.
- Robotic process automation (RPA) and digital process automation (DPA) tools
- Business logic software like business process management (BPM) solutions
- Process or task mining tools to find and prioritize automation activities
- Low-code/no-code tools to develop software
- Cybersecurity automation solutions like automated DAST, vulnerability scanners, threat detection, etc.
- Integration platforms like (iPaaS)
Hyper Automation aims to enhance operational efficiency by reducing/eliminating several manual, repetitive, and time-consuming processes that require human intervention. It also helps prevent associated errors and challenges.
Before implementing automation in your business, you must carefully identify as many tasks and processes as possible that you can automate.
For example, you can evaluate which workflows, production processes, marketing activities, sales processes, report generation, cybersecurity operations, etc. are automatable. If you want to automate incident management, use cybersecurity incident management tools to automate tasks like vulnerability scanning, generating reports, etc.
Why Is Hyper Automation Important?
Going beyond low-scale automation, Hyper Automation is now becoming one of the key factors driving digital transformation, especially after the pandemic and a rise in the distributed workforce.
Hyper Automation enables businesses to:
- Identify and accelerate automation opportunities
- Evaluate technology needs and suitable types of technologies to automate different tasks and processes
- Track automation performance and associated costs
All this helps you create a better automation strategy for your business, prioritize automation activities, create better cybersecurity strategies, and maximize outcomes while keeping costs in check.
Hyper Automation gives you a practical framework to scale and optimize your automation efforts. By reducing the reliance on legacy processes and infrastructure, hyper-automation provides businesses agility, cost reduction, and a competitive edge. It leverages the benefits of modern technologies for streamlining business automation.
For example, hyper-automation utilizes RPA tools for their benefits, such as being intuitive and easy to use, to quickly scale automation efforts.
Using technologies, you can automate tasks that didn’t seem to be possible before, increasing flexibility and allowing you to focus on more important tasks, such as decision-making.
How Does Hyper Automation Work?
Many consider hyper-automation as an extension, a superior version of automation. Unlike automation, hyper-automation works on a larger scale using multiple technologies and tools to automate many tasks and processes. It aims to balance automation and complexity to achieve greater efficiency.
Hyper Automation involves finding workflows or processes that need to be automated. Look for repetitive, manual tasks or ones with too many transactions. Next, it requires choosing the right technologies and tools for automation.
For example, choosing RPA is great for repetitive but simple tasks, AI for complex tasks, and so on. You’ll need to integrate these tools into your workflows and run automation.
In addition, hyper-automation involves reusing useful automation wherever suitable to save time creating new automation for each new use case.
How to Implement Hyper Automation for Businesses?
When implementing hyper-automation in your business, take one step at a time to avoid getting your entire organization overwhelmed. First, discuss your shift from automation to hyper-automation with your team, make them understand the reason behind this shift, and get everyone onboard with your plan. Get your people, processes, and technologies in sync to achieve success.
Here’s the step-by-step process of implementing hyper-automation in your organization.
1. Identify Hyper Automation Opportunities
Take into account all your business processes, activities, and tasks, no matter how small, across your organization. Understand how different tasks operate, business rules, and current practices. In addition, compare your practices to industry-level best practices.
This will help you figure out automation opportunities or tasks that you can automate to maximize business efficiency. You’ll know what to automate, up to what extent, and using which tools – existing or more advanced like AI.
To get a broader view of your processes:
- Conduct an audit organization-wide
- Stay updated with industry best practices for automation
- Interview people in your industry to learn about areas where automation can help
Once you’ve identified processes to automate, document them and discuss the next steps with your team.
2. Make a Solid Strategy
This is the part where you need to make a solid strategy for your automation efforts. For that:
- Clearly define your automation goal for each process. It could be increasing operational efficiency, cutting down costs, creating a robust cybersecurity strategy, providing a better customer experience, and so on.
- Think about what process to automate first. Prioritize them based on the level of impact each process has on your overall business, like cybersecurity, ROI, etc.
- Collect, integrate and analyze data sources that you will need for each identified process. It will help you create data flows in real-time while avoiding confusion during implementation.
- Discuss potential risks associated with the implementation and predict outcomes using ML. Have a plan ready to tackle those challenges.
3. Choose the Right Automation Technologies and Tools
Find out what automation tools and technologies will be useful for you based on the processes you want to automate.
Some of the commonly used automation tools and technologies include RPA, AI and ML, business process management (BPM), optical character recognition tools, image recognition tools, low-code or no-code platforms, cybersecurity automation tools, IoT sensors, analytics tools, business intelligence platforms, and many more.
When choosing an automation tool:
- Look for useful features that can meet your automation needs
- Ensure it’s budget-friendly
- Check online reviews and feedback to evaluate their reputation in the market.
- Go for a free trial if available before buying it.
Automation tools will integrate with your business applications to automate processes like documentation, reporting, customer service, analytics, cybersecurity management, payroll processing, and many more.
4. Organize Your Team
Once you’ve your tools, organize your people and delegate tasks. Never let your people be confused about new changes in the organization. Communicate your plans to employees and leaders. Define rules and frameworks to make the transition easier for everyone in your organization.
Consider reaching out to each department head to supervise automation activities in their departments. They will help you every step of the way, from identifying tasks to implementing automation and tracking performance.
5. Implement Automation
Finally, when you have your tools and identified processes in place, start automating them. Consider taking a phased approach, instead of doing everything at once and overwhelming your teams. Take it slow by automating processes on a small scale. It will help you detect and resolve issues, if any.
Once you are confident, gradually automate other identified processes to unlock business efficiencies.
6. Measure Performance and Improve
After automating different business processes, it’s necessary to find out if your efforts are paying off. Evaluate the effectiveness of your automation by assessing the outcomes.
Example: Suppose you have automated your cybersecurity processes like incident and threat detection and response using an efficient solution like Singularity Data Lake which unifies and transforms data into actionable insights so you can quickly respond to potential threats in real-time. Once implemented, check what benefits you have gained out of it.
- Did it make the incident and threat detection and response faster and more accurate?
- How much time did it save you?
Answers to questions like these will help you measure automation performance. If you spot certain issues affecting the performance, resolve them to make improvements.
What Are the Benefits of Hyper Automation?
Hyper Automation offers many benefits to teams and organizations, such as:
1. Eliminates Repetitive Tasks
Hyper Automation eliminates manual and repetitive tasks by allowing you to seamlessly automate processes and tasks on a large scale, which seemed to be a challenge before. This way, it not only saves time but also eliminates human errors. Thus, you can free up time for more strategic activities like creating a robust cybersecurity strategy and security teams for your business.
2. Improved Operations
Moving on from legacy systems, implementing hyper-automation helps you improve your operations.
But how?
It gives you the opportunity to identify and tackle operational challenges like speed and accuracy in your operations. You can use automation tools like cybersecurity automation tools, RPA, and AI solutions to automate many processes without human intervention or manual errors. This reduces errors, saves time, brings consistency to your tasks, and enhances your overall operations.
3. Scalability
When an organization scales, the amount of data, processes, people, tools, and other components also scales with it. So, when you implement certain changes, your organization must be equipped to deal with all the challenges that come with it.
Hyperautomation offers the required scalability to deal with increased structured and unstructured data volumes, data storage, and changing processes. It enables you to automate processes on a large scale without human intervention so that you can embrace changes confidently.
4. Rapid Innovation
With hyper-automation, organizations can free significant time to invest in innovation opportunities by automating time-consuming, tedious tasks. You will have time to make better strategies, make reforms, and utilize modern tools like cybersecurity automation solutions to innovate your products and services. This will attract more customers and position you as a leader in your industry.
5. Employee Productivity
Automation empowers your employees and helps enhance their productivity. They can use automation tools to offer quick support, manage accounts, schedule tasks, perform data entry, threat detection, manage cybersecurity, etc.
So, instead of handling these repetitive tasks daily, they can automate these processes and participate in more strategic and responsible tasks, such as evaluating performance, making decisions, improving workflows, and so on.
6. Cost Reduction
Organizations, especially large-scale ones, have many departments, people, unstructured data, and complex operations. Small-scale automations are not enough to meet their needs.
But by automating various operations on a large scale using hyper-automation technologies, you can achieve greater efficiency and save costs significantly. According to a Gartner report, businesses can cut down 30% on their operational costs by using hyper-automation technologies.
So, instead of investing in legacy infrastructure, you can use modern tools and solutions offering greater flexibility at lower costs. This way, hyper-automation will also enable you to make smarter decisions related to expenses and help you gain better ROI.
What Are the Hyper Automation Use Cases?
Hyper Automation is applied in many industries to improve their operational efficiency. Here are some of the use cases of hyperautomation:
1. Supply Chain
The supply chain industry uses hyperautomation extensively.
Examples:
- An online food delivery company can automate order tracking and deliveries and reconcile transactions with food delivery partners.
- A supplier can automate the process of tracking their inventory and forecasting needs based on current sales data. This data helps them plan their strategies, such as when to stock inventory and how much.
- A manufacturing company can use RPA to monitor inventory 24/7 in addition to processes like quote requests, billing, procurement, repair and maintenance, customer follow-ups, and more.
2. BFSI
The banking, finance services, and insurance (BFSI) industry is regulated heavily by the authorities and compliance regulations. This is why they need all their processes to be free of errors and inefficiencies because one single mistake can turn out to be a disaster for a business and /or its customers.
The BFSI industry uses hyper-automation to enhance data quality, data management, and operations, reduce costs, and offer excellent customer experiences.
Examples:
- Organizations can use business process management (BPM) to help customers make informed financial decisions.
- Banks can automate their documentation, auditing, and reporting processes to stay compliant with regulations and offer 24/7 online banking services to customers.
- Accounting firms can use computer vision to automate their account payable/receivable processes.
3. Healthcare
The healthcare industry aims to improve its processes to provide better patient care, reduce costs, and maximize ROI. It’s also a highly regulated industry, thus, data management, data security and privacy are of utmost importance. Regulations like HIPAA require healthcare institutes to maintain high data confidentiality and security with advanced measures like security analysis, security data lake, encryptions, etc.
Using hyper-automation, healthcare institutions can automate the process of collecting and recording patient data, billing cycles, and communications. You can also use advanced automation tools to correlate the patient data produced and provide better treatment plans, predict outcomes, and serve customers well.
In addition, healthcare institutions can use hyper-automation to manage drug procurement and inventory and prepare for audits and reporting. They can also track changing regulations to stay compliant while avoiding hefty penalties.
4. E-commerce
The e-commerce and retail industry is growing fast, bringing opportunities for businesses to gain greater ROI. According to Statista, e-commerce sales worldwide can exceed US$ 6.3 trillion in 2024, and the figure could grow even more in the years to come.
However, competition is also fierce in every sector of e-commerce. Thus, finding a way to steer clear of the race and delight customers with better products and services is the key. Hyper automation helps you achieve that by automating repetitive tasks and utilizing that time to build better offerings and improve customer service.
Examples:
- Using low-code/no-code development platforms, you can build budget-friendly applications to sell your products and services.
- Improving marketing efforts by automating tasks like sending bulk emails, social media ad placements, designing engaging images, conducting competitor analysis, etc.
- Automating mundane processes like billing, payroll, inventory management, and more
5. Customer Service
Providing outstanding customer service is vital for every business. With increasing competition, you need to stand out by going the extra mile and serving your customers. One negative review online can tarnish your reputation.
With hyper-automation, you can delight your customers by being available 24/7 and assisting them whenever you need them. For this, you can use smart AI chatbots to answer some generic questions. It will also help you save agents’ time so they can prioritize critical queries.
How SentinelOne Can Help?
SentinelOne Singularity Platform democratizes advanced cyber security operations and provides unmatched Security Operations Center (SOC) capabilities for companies of all sizes. It combines enterprise-wide visibility with centralized and actionable data insights powered by Singularity Data Lake. Purple AI provides an always-available cyber security analyst that augments the skills of security teams and turbocharges their efficiency.
Key features demonstrated by SentinelOne that empower organizations with hyper-automation capabilities are:
- AI-powered anomaly detection
- 24/7 zero-touch auto-investigations
- Detailed adversarial TTPs, security alerts enrichment, and enhanced threat hunting
- Singularity Operations Center and unified security console
- Mandiant Threat Intelligence
- Risk correlation from integrated log sources
- Ingests telemetry data from any source
- Automated alert triage
- Hyper automation rules
- AI-powered response recommendations
- Built on the Open Cybersecurity Schema Framework (OCSF)
Conclusion
Every business seeks to achieve better ROI, profits, and customer satisfaction. Hyperatomation enables businesses across industries to realize these goals by automating their repetitive, manual process to improve their operations, save time and cost, data storage, improve cybersecurity, and serve customers better.
Ready to automate your business processes? We at SentinelOne can help.