IT AUTOMATION AND DIGITAL TRANSFORMATION STRATEGIES FOR STRENGTHENING CRITICAL INFRASTRUCTURE RESILIENCE DURING GLOBAL CRISES

Abstract

This study addresses a pressing problem for operators of critical infrastructure: how to achieve dependable continuity and rapid recovery during global crises when complex, interdependent systems are under stress. The purpose is to quantify the associations between two strategic capabilities digital transformation strategy intensity and IT automation maturity and organizational resilience outcomes. Using a quantitative, cross-sectional, case-based design, we analyzed survey data from 156 cloud and enterprise cases spanning energy, healthcare, finance, telecommunications, transportation, and water. The work was grounded by a targeted review of 48 scholarly papers to inform construct definitions and instrumentation. Key variables included IT Automation Maturity, Digital Transformation Strategy Intensity, Crisis Severity, and controls for sector, size, legacy technology debt, and baseline cyber posture; the dependent variable was a composite Resilience Outcomes index covering service continuity, recovery speed, incident trends, and availability adherence. The analysis plan combined descriptive profiling, zero-order correlations, and hierarchical ordinary least squares with interaction and moderation terms, followed by robustness checks with sector fixed effects and telemetry-augmented outcomes. Headline findings show that both automation and transformation are positively associated with resilience, their interaction is synergistic, and the benefits of automation strengthen as crisis severity rises. Implications for practice are clear: pair architectural modernization cloud, governed data platforms, API-first and identity-centric controls with codified execution infrastructure-as-code, complete CI/CD pipelines, observability in delivery, progressive releases, and preapproved automated remediation to compress detection and restoration latencies and to localize failures across ecosystems.