Digital Workers Are Identities Too!

Blue Prism and SailPoint

With the need to continually innovate, evolve and improve processes, enterprises need to consistently be more efficient, secure and compliant.  This is true now more than ever! Enterprises are having to evaluate processes and automate as much as possible to ensure the safety of their employees. This means enabling the workforce for remote work, ensuring appropriate access, remotely onboarding hundreds of new workers and now facilitating reentering the workforce post stay-at-home-order. Automation becomes easier with the use of Digital Workers or robotic process automation (RPA); giving enterprises a way to increase efficiencies and productivity while also saving money.

Gartner estimates that by the end of 2022, 85% of large and very large organizations will have deployed some form of RPA software. The majority of enterprises have adopted RPAs and according to Deloitte, 78% of enterprises expect to increase investment in RPA over the next three years. As organizations accelerate their deployment of a digital workforce, it raises the question of compliance and security.

“Do I need the same level of security with my bots as I do with the rest of my users?”

Bot’s follow a lifecycle process like their human counterparts. This includes on-boarding, off-boarding (terminate) and adjusting access to data, applications, and information as their function changes. More importantly to note, access to information can often include sensitive business data and files. For reference consider chatbots – you know those sometimes pesky webpage pop-ups that ask you questions?  They are on nearly every website and access such systems as service desks and databases containing customer and account information.  Just like their human counterparts, these bots are targeted by cybercriminals due to the fact that more often than not, they are not being managed or secured; leaving organizations susceptible to risk and data breach. As organizations deploy identity management solutions it is important to remember that Bot’s are identities too and should be governed as such!  Implementing strong access controls and policies not only helps to mitigate that risk but also helps ensure you can address those big data privacy compliance regulations such as GDPR, CCPA, and PDPA.

SailPoint as the leader in identity management, and Blue Prism, a pioneer in Robotic Process Automation, have come together to provide the next generation of integrated, intelligent RPA governance and security.

SailPoint helps organizations understand ‘who has access to what?’, ‘is that access appropriate?’ and ‘what is an identity doing with that access?’. These three questions are key to helping ensure enterprises are able to stay secure and in control of all access to applications and data – on-premises or in the cloud.

How it Works

By leveraging Blue Prism as an authoritative source for Digital Workers, the SailPoint identity governance platform helps aggregate and automate the access rights to these resources, including the ability to add new ones, remove them when no longer needed and even certify or verify, their access for auditing and reporting purposes. 

This combined solution ensures your digital workforce stays secure and compliant.

Blue Prism and SailPoint help organizations maintain updated information about Blue Prism bots (aka credentials), while ensuring that the access granted to these credentials is appropriate through SailPoint’s identity governance platform. Utilizing this integration, enterprises will be able to increase efficiencies through intelligent automation, gain in depth visibility, ensure audit readiness and manage the full lifecycle of their Digital Workforce.  

A great example is National Bank who is leveraging the combined technologies and integration.  The bank relies on SailPoint to manage access requests for their Blue Prism RPA identities. With SailPoint and Blue Prism, the bank can streamline how it governs bot identities and their associated access to enterprise applications and data through the enforcement of processes, such as the requesting, approving, and certifying of access. Check out the customer blog here.

As technology and innovation are changing the way we work, the nature of business users is also evolving.  Now, businesses can automate and secure their digital workforce alongside their human counter parts.  As I have broken down previously, Digital Workers are identities too and now thanks to this integration of SailPoint and Blue Prism, they will be governed equally as such.