Digital Resilience and Public Safety: Why Secure Automation Matters Beyond IT

Abstract

The growing reliance of contemporary society on digital infrastructure would render secure automation not only an engineering problem but also a primary societal issue of public safety concern, with potentially far-reaching consequences for national security, economic stability, and societal well-being. The automated systems in areas such as healthcare delivery, transportation networks, financial infrastructure, and energy utilities have continuous integration pipelines, orchestration platforms, and machine-driven control loops running at an unprecedented scale and complexity. Although automation provides significant efficiency and opens up new services that were previously unavailable, it also introduces systemic risks, such as software supply chain breaches, malconfigured pipelines during deployment, and unauthorized code editing, which can lead to cascading failures with catastrophic real-world impacts. The article explores the intersection of Systems Infrastructure and Automation Engineering with digital resilience, national security frameworks, and public welfare requirements, and proposes a general Digital Resilience Framework that can integrate secure DevOps and Infrastructure-as-Code practices into critical societal domains. The framework focuses on reliable automation based on zero-trust architectures, policy-driven verification, cryptographic provenance, and resilient orchestration of multi-cloud and hybrid systems. This article argues that secure automation serves as the foundational layer on which the trust of digital society in the general population should be built, through interdisciplinary studies that combine engineering principles, cybersecurity standards, socio-technological governance frameworks, and policy frameworks. The article ends with recommendations on how to apply the principles of safety engineering, the supply chain verification rules, the ongoing monitoring of compliance, and the collaboration between the different sectors into the national strategies of digital resiliency, where automation security level should be managed in the same manner as the traditional engineering fields, such as enhanced governance, transparency, and moral accountability.