Organizations across every industry are realizing they can “win big” with digital transformation, both in the near term and in the future as they scale its benefits across their operations. This isn’t surprising since automation has proven to be an effective way for businesses to optimize core and non-core operations across departments and functions and significantly boost efficiency and productivity.
Yet it’s essential that processes executed by automation are performed with a level of consistency and reliability that meets audit, operational and customer service standards. Therefore, savvy organizations are becoming just as focused on controlling and securing automation as they are building and deploying automation solutions.
Identity Governance—The Bridge Between Scale and Security
Although identity governance isn’t a new concept, it’s becoming more relevant in the era of RPA and intelligent automation. Why? Consider that more than half of respondents in Deloitte’s third annual RPA survey (53%) said they’ve already embarked on their RPA journey. Deloitte expects that figure to reach 72 percent in the next two years. With such a potentially large wave of RPA adoption, the potential for bots to be used without appropriate identity governance is significant.
So, while traditionally identity governance has encompassed how enterprises provision, audit and report employee access to enterprise systems and applications, now it increasingly encompasses identities used by automation. Frequently, these identities now impersonate human users on physical and virtual desktops to perform actions that people would typically perform. Identity governance for the digital workforce allows organizations to centrally manage and control assignment of access rights to the systems that automation interacts with.
Identity governance can be thought of as a bridge between “scale” and “security.” Treating digital identities in the same manner as human-based identities helps organizations stay ahead of the security curve, which is essential to ensuring governance and audit standards are met.
Ideally, identity governance should be a consideration from day one with any digital transformation initiative; of course, it exponentially grows in importance as an organization's automation footprint expands. A critical early step in any plan is to identify governance processes for automation so they can continue to enforce policy in an environment that has multiple classes of workers—people and digital.