As companies refine their strategies for handling non-human identifiers (NHI), robotic process automation (RPA) has become a powerful tool for streamlining operations and increasing security. However, RPA bots have different levels of access to sensitive information, so businesses should be prepared to mitigate different challenges. Bots are beginning to outnumber human employees in large organizations, and without proper identity lifecycle management, these bots pose increased security risks. RPA impacts identity and access management (IAM) by managing bot identities, enforcing least privilege access, and ensuring auditability across all accounts.
Keep reading to learn more about RPA, the challenges of RPA in IAM, and best practices that organizations should follow to secure RPA within IAM.
What is Robotic Process Automation (RPA)?
Robotic process automation (RPA) uses bots to automate repetitive tasks traditionally performed by human users. In the context of IAM, RPA plays a critical role in streamlining the user lifecycle, including provisioning, deprovisioning, and secure access to credentials. These RPA bots act as NHIs and require governance just like human users do for authentication, access control, and monitoring of privileged sessions. As RPA adoption increases, IAM systems must consistently manage both human identity and national health insurance within a unified security framework. The main benefits of RPA are:
Increased efficiency and speed: RPA automates time-consuming and repetitive tasks such as provisioning and deprovisioning, allowing IT teams to focus on high-priority tasks. Increased accuracy: RPA minimizes human error by following predefined scripts and reduces the risk of misconfigurations. Bots also automate credential handling and eliminate common problems such as password reuse. Enhanced security: RPA enhances IAM by triggering deprovisioning as soon as an employee leaves your organization. Automated bots can also detect and respond to behavioral anomalies in real time, limiting the impact of unauthorized access. Improved compliance: RPA supports regulatory compliance obligations by automatically logging all bot actions and enforcing access policies. RPA combined with Zero Trust security principles enables continuous verification of all identities, human or machine.
Challenges RPA poses to IAM
As organizations expand their use of RPA, several challenges have emerged that can weaken the effectiveness of existing IAM strategies, including bot management, expanded attack surfaces, and integration difficulties.
Managing bots
As RPA bots take on more critical tasks across the enterprise, managing their identity and access has become a top priority. Unlike human users, bots operate silently in the background, but still require authentication and authorization. Without proper identity governance, improperly monitored bots can create security gaps within an organization’s IAM. A common problem is how bots store credentials, often with hardcoded passwords or API keys embedded in scripts or configuration files.
Increased attack surface area
Each RPA bot has a new NHI, and each NHI introduces attack vectors that cybercriminals can exploit. Without strict enforcement of the Principle of Least Privilege (PoLP), bots can be over-provisioned with access beyond what is needed for repetitive tasks. If compromised, bots could be used to move laterally within the network and steal sensitive data. To maintain zero trust security, it’s important to protect bots’ privileged access and manage credentials with just-in-time (JIT) access.
Integration difficulties
Many traditional IAM systems were not built with modern RPA integration in mind, making it difficult for enterprises to enforce consistent access policies for both human users and NHI. Gaps in integration can result in unmanaged credentials, poor audit trails, and inconsistently applied access controls. Without alignment between RPA and IAM, organizations risk reduced visibility and inconsistencies across automated processes.
Best practices for securing RPA within IAM
Securing RPA within IAM requires more than just giving bots access. Organizations must treat automated processes with the same attention to detail as they do with human users. Here are some best practices to keep your RPA deployment secure and aligned with Zero Trust security principles.
1. Prioritize bot IDs
Treating RPA bots as first-class identities is critical to maintaining strong IAM. Because bots interact with core systems and often operate with elevated privileges, it’s important to give each bot only the minimum access necessary for its specific task. Each bot must be assigned an ID with its own unique credentials to ensure they are not shared or reused across other bots or services. This approach to bot management allows security teams to grant or revoke access and better track each bot’s activity without disrupting broader workflows.
2. Use a secret manager
RPA bots typically rely on credentials or SSH keys to function and interact with critical systems and APIs. Storing these secrets in clear-text configuration files or scripts makes them easy targets for cybercriminals and difficult to rotate securely. Dedicated secret management tools like Keeper® ensure all credentials are encrypted and centrally managed in a zero-knowledge vault. Secrets are retrieved at runtime and do not reside in memory or on the device.
3. Implementation of PAM
Bots that perform repetitive administrative tasks often require privileged access, making privileged access management (PAM) essential. A PAM solution should enforce JIT access and ensure that bots receive privileged access if needed and within a limited amount of time. By monitoring and recording sessions to maintain transparency and detect anomalous bot activity, implementing PAM eliminates always-on access and helps prevent privilege escalation.
4. Strengthening authentication with MFA
Human users managing RPA bots must authenticate using multi-factor authentication (MFA). Since MFA is not practical for bot accounts themselves, providing an additional layer of protection for users managing bot accounts can help prevent unauthorized access to critical systems, sensitive data, and privileged credentials. Additionally, organizations should embrace Zero Trust Network Access (ZTNA) principles by continuously validating a bot’s identity and context throughout each privileged session, not just at login.
Secure the future of automation with IAM
Automation continues to transform the way businesses operate, primarily due to the rise of NHIs like RPA bots. To keep up with this technology evolution, organizations must adjust their IAM strategies to accommodate and secure both human users and automated bots. KeeperPAM® helps enterprises close potential security gaps such as credential theft and privilege abuse by providing a unified platform for credential management, PoLP enforcement, privileged session monitoring, and complete identity lifecycle management for all identities, human and non-human.
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