Robotic process automation (RPA) is fast becoming a popular way to streamline and automate repetitive tasks within an organisation, freeing up employees’ time for higher value tasks. The benefits of RPA are extensive, from saving a business time and money to improving customer satisfaction. What’s more, your employees may experience better job satisfaction as they deal with more rewarding tasks, leaving the mundane jobs to the RPA technology.
However, RPA can handle a lot of sensitive data and even move it across systems. It’s important that your RPA solution is secure, reducing cybersecurity risks across the business. Robiquity help us to understand more about making sure you have the right measures in place for your RPA solution.
Addressing the security of RPA
The two main risks associated with RPA are data leakage and fraud, but both can be mitigated with the right security measures, allowing you to use your RPA solution with confidence.
There are a number of steps you can take to protect sensitive data and ensure information isn’t exposed to cyberattacks, including accountability, avoiding fraud, protecting integrity and secure development.
Accountability for RPA bots
Over the last 12 months, many businesses have implemented RPA much quicker than they first anticipated due to the pandemic. Organisations found that RPA was able to minimise costs and make better use of their employees’ time, which can be crucial during difficult and unforeseen circumstances.
It’s important that businesses differentiate between bot operators and bot identities, ensuring unique credentials and identity naming standards. Without this, you have limited accountability for the RPA bots within your system.
You could also consider two-factor authentication for human to system, along with standard username and password authentication.
Reduce the risk of fraud
It’s important to be aware of the increase in account privileges that comes with RPA implementation, in particular when it comes to bot access for tasks. It would be extremely beneficial to restrict access to what each bot needs in order to complete their task at hand. For instance, if a bot copies from one database and pastes them into another document or email, the bot should only be allowed read access to the database.
This can help you to avoid abuse or fraud and ensure your RPA implementation runs smoothly. Consider additional measures to help manage the sessions such as screenshots or video, which can deter would-be fraudsters.
Understand the integrity of your logs
If RPA security were to fail and you experienced a breach or hack, your organisation’s security team will no doubt need to investigate and review activity logs. RPA logs should be stored securely and separately, so they are free from the risk of being tampered with.
Your RPA solution should be able to provide a complete log with no gaps, so that your in-house security team aren’t hindered during an investigation.
Development of your RPA solution
RPA solutions can be scalable depending on your business needs, and this ongoing development comes with the need to evolve in order to continue tackling security threats. Don’t overlook the security considerations when deploying RPA tools, or it could cost you later down the line.
Ensure the team that leads your RPA solutions is in regular contact with your security team, so that the RPA implementation can regularly evaluated, reviewed and tested.
