By Advanced Systems Concepts, Inc.
Businesses face an evolving threat landscape as reliance on digital technology grows. The bigger the digital footprint, the more potential for points of failure or for unauthorized access.
One of the challenges in addressing these risks is that digital environments span the organization, crossing departments, silos, platforms and even geographic locations. This complexity makes it difficult to ensure that compliance and security requirements are being met.
Multiple tools are often used to maintain compliance and security, such as threat monitoring tools, identity management software, custom encryption applications and more. Adding too many new tools only adds to the organization’s digital complexity, causing potential blindspots across the attack surface.
Process automation platforms can help prevent unauthorized access, failures, outages and more. Extensible automation tools, such as workload automation software, enables users to manage and monitor disparate processes across the organization. This makes it possible to enforce compliance and best practices while extending security capabilities to disparate endpoints.
Businesses can leverage extensible automation platforms to help prevent and mitigate critical issues such as outages and cyberattacks. Here are six ways that automation can help protect your business.
1. Eliminate Manual Errors
Manual tasks are time-consuming, causing bottlenecks and delays and making it impossible to achieve scale. Manual tasks are also error-prone. This can lead to serious issues such as server outages or leave your organization vulnerable to external attacks. A report by the Uptime Institute found that 70% of data center failures are caused by human error.
Workload automation (WLA) solutions enable businesses to eliminate manual tasks. Reusable templates can provide built-in governance while permissioning can be automatically passed down to processes. Additionally, automation solutions can also be used to provision cloud-based servers or virtual machines automatically so that users don’t have to configure each new machine, reducing the risk of error.
2. Ensure High Availability
Digital processes need to be reliable. Failures can anger customers, delay services or cause larger issues downstream. Automation platforms can provide high availability to help guarantee that processes complete on time, every time.
Workload automation software can easily handle large volumes of simultaneous processes, ensuring reliability for all enterprise-level workloads. In the case of an issue or failure, WLA tools can automatically trigger remediation workflows, reroute workloads, pause or restart processes, provision new resources or issue alerts to the appropriate users.
Real-time monitoring and alerting can be used to quickly notify users of potential issues, enabling swift responses that minimize or eliminate any impact on the business.
3. Provide Failover Capabilities
Most organizations rely on job schedulers to trigger processes either manually or automatically. This includes date/time scheduling and event-based scheduling, where processes are triggered automatically based on IT or business events.
Job schedulers manage sensitive processes that are critical for day-to-day operations. A failure in this context could be catastrophic. Businesses should take care to ensure that a stand-by scheduler is available in case a primary scheduler faces an outage or other serious issue.
Stand-by schedulers provide failover capabilities by monitoring the health of the primary scheduler. If a serious issue is detected, all jobs and workloads are directed to the failover system in order to complete as expected.
Automation software can also provide failover for execution servers. Organizations connect WLA tools to multiple servers for processing workloads, creating a distributed system that can rapidly adapt to server outages.
4. Support Auditing And Compliance
Internal and external regulations are always evolving. By orchestrating processes from a single location, such as a WLA platform, users can easily manage governance and extend best practices across the enterprise.
For example, a WLA tool should always be used to maintain full audit trails for all objects, events and user accounts. This enables businesses to quickly identify issues and to provide audits that prove compliance.
Additionally, centralized automation tools can also enforce compliance across silos. This can include a variety of different requirements such as identifying authorization or explaining the reasons for a particular change.
5. Prevent Unauthorized Access
Extensible automation platforms connect to endpoints across the business, handling sensitive data and critical workloads. The last thing any business wants is users or external actors gaining unauthorized access.
Automation platforms can provide multiple methods for preventing unwanted access to critical processes, data and systems. This includes integrating with directory services such as Active Directory or LDAP to provide a single point of administration across the enterprise. Automation platforms can also provide multi-tenant architecture to limit access and permissions to different sections of the automation environment.
Automation platforms can also provide direct integrations with identity management solutions such as CyberArk. This enables the automation solution to dynamically retrieve user or machine credentials, providing an additional layer of security and simplifying credential management.
Where possible, multi-factor authentication should always be implemented. This can include username and password, SAP credentials, keyfile and passphrase and more, and can be managed directly through an automation solution.
6. Secure Connections With Data Encryption
The average enterprise shares files with over 800 different online domains, according to research firm Varonis. Businesses frequently share sensitive information, data and files with vendors, partners and customers, usually over the internet.
WLA tools support a broad range of use cases. This includes IT process automation, business process management and managed file transfers. As a result, WLA solutions give businesses the opportunity to leverage secure connections for all critical file transfers. Where possible, secure protocols such as TLS, SFTP, OFTP or AS2 should always be used to encrypt sensitive information and prevent unauthorized users from accessing key files.
Applying Security Consistently Across The Enterprise
Cybersecurity becomes a bigger risk as tech stacks expand and become more diverse. Ensuring compliance and enforcing policies across different technologies, cloud providers and systems is difficult, and piecemeal approaches can lead to oversights and unexpected vulnerabilities. Having a unified automation platform improves security by making it easier to standardize processes and meet requirements across business and IT environments.
