Credential management best practices for business process automations

Business efficiency is an endless pursuit for enterprises.

Today, IT departments in many organizations rely heavily on automations to utilize available resources optimally, cut operational costs, and enhance overall productivity. Technologies such as application programming interfaces (APIs), Internet of Things (IoT), and robotic process automation (RPA) bots are extensively used to automate repetitive business processes and workflows that do not require human intervention.

As automation tools and platforms continue to gain popularity among industries, it is equally essential to acknowledge the security risks that arise from this technology. The most prominent risk factor associated with automation is credential exposure as nearly all business processes require a level of administrative access to confidential information. This, in turn, requires organizations to provision automation tools with elevated access privileges for sensitive data servers to successfully complete tasks.

IT administrators typically enable these privileges by embedding passwords, API keys, and other credentials directly into automation scripts they create. Administrators usually find it difficult to identify, change, and manage the embedded credentials once the automation workflows are moved to the production environment and are activated. As a result, the credentials are left unchanged, which can lead to unauthorized access to sensitive systems. Hard-coding plain text credentials might simplify business process automation (BPA), but it's also an easy launch-point for attackers.

This webinar will give you a clear picture of the various credential-related perils that BPA introduces in your enterprise and the steps you can take to mitigate the risk.

Key takeaways

• Why credential exposure is a grave risk in today's BPA setups.
• Credential management best practices that you can integrate with your BPA tasks to fortify your enterprise.