Identity and Access Management (IAM) can manage and secure identities while providing authorized access to every application and process across the organization. IAM ensures employees are empowered to deliver value by enhancing their productivity and collaboration through proper authentication procedures. IAM is also playing its due role in the way organizations secure data and assets while interacting with third-party vendors.
However, traditional IAM solutions do have some drawbacks.
- They function in siloes since each business function has its identity and access privileges customized to its needs.
- Decentralized IAM set-ups lead to challenges in provisioning and de-provisioning of access, resulting in a possible security breach.
- Less visibility to access control practices, there is also difficulty in offering consistent user experience for employees to connect to various resources.
- Lack of centralized IAM practices leads to manual provisioning; any failure in de-provisioning can lead to a security compromise.
- Manual interventions are labor-intensive, erroneous, and not sustainable.
Moreover, organizations now are looking at IAM systems, which are interoperable and integrates data from various business functions, ensuring visibility and allowing access to multiple users. Nevertheless, there is an issue of integration in such IAM deployments, as there is a lack of standardization of integration capabilities and procedures.
Custom adaptors or connectors must be built to integrate the IAM system to target applications. The effort to develop connectors is highly expensive and are not adaptable to any IAM upgrade invariably getting replaced. Also, further integrations to any new or additional environment tend to be costly, leaving broader goals of IAM objectives to loom at large.
Lack of API’s to integrate legacy IAM systems with distributed, interconnected digital applications is another bottleneck which makes deployment more challenging. They also are incapable of getting integrated with the latest threat intelligence systems and offer no session management support to digital solutions such as SaaS and mobile apps.
Traditional IAM systems are, therefore outdated to handle the needs of today’s enterprise.
Robotics to the fore
Rapid digitization has resulted in a rapid increase in data, identities, and access requests to critical technology systems, applications, and platforms. There is also a higher demand for privacy and to meet privacy regulations such as GDPR for ensuring better transparency and trust. User identity and access administration tasks must be automated using robotics to manage this scale while authoring and granting access to resources.
Automation using robotics is imperative since traditional IAM relies solely on manual provisioning, which is known to be repetitive, inefficient, and resource-intensive. Agent bandwidth must be sfreed to focus on more strategic tasks since the time, cost, and possibility of error is high while managing rule-based, repetitive tasks. When IAM tasks are automated using robotics, these rule-based tasks are handled seamlessly and with a high degree of efficiency.
Robotic automation of IAM processes can either execute tasks and enhance human effort or execute tasks independent of humans. Robotic processes when paired with IAM can ensure a simple, secure, affordable solution that can be seamlessly integrated with the business providing a faster return on investment in very less time. Automating IAM using robotics is technically and financially viable since it can be supported by all business functions and not exclusively by the IT team.
Key benefits of robotics driven IAM include:
- Faster deployment of multiple robots to execute scheduled tasks, reassign them based on the process importance and criticality sine robots can handle many processes.
- Exceptional accuracy in performing tasks due to their rule-based approach.
- Robotic tasks can be monitored and recorded for audits and process improvements, helping in the easy accomplishment of compliance.
- Automation of administrative tasks and improve efficiencies at scale.
- Enable better user experiences through governance and administration controls.
- Automate reviews of daily access and compliance reports and warn security teams of any glitches that might need remediation.
Robotics processes can help organizations reduce complexity and inconsistency in their IAM processes due to diverse and dissimilar environments such as cloud, on-premise, remote working resources, etc. It can also centralize access, authorization, and authentication of privileged accounts while simplifying processes with bare minimum human intervention.
Centralized management of robotic IAM processes can scale growth without any silos, which might lead to risky practices. A higher value can also be driven by migrating your traditional IAM solution to more modern Robotics driven IAM solution to lower administration and hardware costs, improve access, directory and authentication abilities.
Interested to know how Aujas can help you leverage robotic process automation to establish, manage and govern access controls & digital identities?
Click here to download the Frost and Sullivan Whitepaper on Robotics driven IAM or talk to us at contact@aujas.com.
