Fiber networks have been designed to overcome link outages, such as cable cuts, with sophisticated layer 2 and 3 protection schemes. However, wide-area network failure due to natural disaster or human attack/sabotage present major challenges to network operators, which must deploy vast resources to manually re-configure the network around the failure. Teams must be dispatched to discover available resources, conduct rapid planning operations, and manually re-route the physical network around the affected area.

Disaster recovery is greatly facilitated by automated mechanisms. With AFM, disaster recovery plans can be implemented from the network operations center. Auto-discovery features can be used to identify available network routes for re-route planning, even if databases have been compromised. New physical paths can be set up to bypass the affected area, along with new redundant paths. Response plans can even be automated in advance, to initiate auto-discovery and rapid network planning operations immediately following the detection of a massive outage.