Robotic Process Automation (RPA) allows a business to deploy a digital workforce in the form of bots that can emulate a human’s actions within computer systems, executing tasks more efficiently and freeing the user from repetitive and tedious tasks.
RPA naturally increases productivity and helps streamline operations. There is a near limitless number of tasks RPA can tackle. However, since RPA bots will handle customer data, financial information, or any otherwise sensitive data, it's essential to keep certain security practices in place. Leaks or attacks are always a possibility.
Here’s a short but impactful list of the best security practices to follow when implementing and using RPA.
Your security team should take an active role in both the implementation of RPA and the creation and deployment of every RPA bot. By establishing a common risk framework for your security team and RPA bot operators, you can perform risk analysis on every stage of RPA deployment. Security experts should integrate their regular software security practices in RPA to identify security flaws before they pose a problem. Building such a framework ensures that every bot created and used is secured.
It is crucial to always clearly distinguish between a real user's actions and a programmed RPA bot. To avoid confusion, bot operators should never give RPA bots privileges and credentials of actual real humans.
Each bot should have its own set of credentials that can identify it. This mitigates the impact of a potential hack by ensuring that every step can be retraced. Should a bot be misused, its records can be beneficial in building future securities and repairing any damage done. To do that, we need to distinguish between the scripted activity of a bot and the actions of a real user.