The Imperative of Credential Security Management (CSM) in RPA

RPA’s Staggering Growth

In 2019, Gartner labeled RPA as the fastest-growing enterprise software category and predicted that within the next two years, 72% of organizations would be working with RPA with interest growing further in 2020. Some numbers used by Gartner and Forrester to illustrate this growth include:

According to Deloitte, at the current rate of growth, adoption will become saturated – nearly every company will be using it in some form in the next five years, and RPA will reach near-universal adoption at some point in 2023. With these amazing predictions, organizations for fear of missing out are clamoring to implement RPA and expand it across their organizations.

The Ripple Effect

There is a significant challenge to highlight the excitement for RPA deployment.

RPA implementation is only as efficient as the person configuring the automation flow. If there are unexpected scenarios for which the bot has not been configured to take necessary action, it will affect the flow and could break the whole chain of automated tasks. The anticipation of all possible combinations of scenarios the bot could encounter is the key to configuring a successful automation flow using RPA. With the implementation of RPA combined with a large amount of information flowing across disparate teams, partners, devices, clouds, vendors, and customers, the old school human-only approach to information security alone cannot scale to handle this data deluge which can lead to costly mistakes. These automation processes need an enterprise-grade security mechanism to ensure that sensitive data like automation credentials are stored securely, and also that right access privileges are granted for software bots to gain access to these credentials.

AssistEdge RPA Credential Management

With AssistEdge, organizations can deploy their RPA programs with an end-to-end solution in mind, which refers to ‘discovering’ the right processes for automation using AssistEdge Discover. Recognized as an RPA leader in the 2019 Forrester Wave Report, AssistEdge RPA includes the ability to allow software bots to manage the automation credential security. Some critical aspects of credentials and safekeeping include:

AssistEdge RPA provides an in-built feature called Credential Manager to safely store business application credentials and their assignments as well as accessibility to intended robots. Key features include:

Credential Security Management (CSM) Industry

When it comes to credential security management, some companies focus entirely on this arena. One such company is CyberArk, an information security company whose technology ensures that people in an enterprise have the appropriate access to internal resources. With the enormous interest for RPA implementation, CyberArk customers who want to deploy AssistEdge RPA can use their existing CyberArk credential security platform. AssistEdge is a CyberArk certified alliance partner product and works out-of-the-box with CyberArk in addition to other credential security management companies in the market.  

The decision on which CSM platform to deploy depends on whether your organization is already using other CSM software such as CyberArk. If so, it may make sense from a practical implementation perspective to continue leveraging your existing CSM software and integrate it with AssistEdge RPA. If your organization does not have any existing credential security support, AssistEdge RPA’s out-of-the-box support is more than enough for your needs.

In the end, with RPA’s growth in implementations likely saturating every organization in the next five years, the need for automated credential security management is clear. With more individuals involved with the implementation and deployment of RPA in cases of attended automation and unattended automation, automated credential security is crucial. Bots and humans involved in automated processes will need access to different applications within an organization, and the organization needs assurance that these access rights are secure and accurate. AssistEdge has already included this feature in their RPA product. In organizations where the needs for credential management span across applications, a solution like CyberArk may be more appropriate. In these cases, AssistEdge RPA is also able to integrate with CyberArk and other similar platforms.

Sources:
www.enterpriseproject.com
www.gcn.com