Fortune 100 company accelerates operational agility with CyberArk blue prism integration

Company profile

A global insurance provider overcomes operational challenges, streamlines workflow processes and enables organizational innovation – all while maintaining a high-level of security to their new digital workforce.
– Employees: 10,000+

Challenges

Robotic Process Automation (RPA) has for years been among the fastest-growing segments of the enterprise software market – according to Gartner, the size of the RPA market increased 63% in 2018 and has been growing ever since.1 The global market is expected to approach $2 billion in 2021 and continue to grow at double-digit rates through 2024, despite economic pressures from COVID-19.2 It’s not hard to see why – organizations that adopt RPA can expect reduced costs as well as significantly improved compliance and productivity, among other benefits.

This global insurance provider has embarked on a multi-year digital transformation journey aimed at achieving agile development at scale. To help steer this strategic initiative, the company’s application development team has embraced Blue Prism’s RPA technologies to automate operational activities, test new applications and accelerate operational agility. Over the past 12 months as part of a proof of concept, the firm integrated 10 business critical applications – including SAP, Windows and Lightweight Directory Access Protocol (LDAP) – into the Blue Prism Digital Workforce Platform.

To interact directly with business applications, RPA software must mimic the way applications use and mirror human credentials and entitlements. This can introduce significant risk when the software robots automate and perform business processes – whether logging into a system to access data or moving a process from one step to the next. Often times, the credentials being used are hardcoded directly within the application. If an attacker successfully steals these credentials, they can ultimately take full control over the robot and gain access to target critical systems, applications and data. Fully understanding these risks, the CVP of Privileged Access Management at the firm, made securing privileged access to these robotic credentials a top priority.

Solutions

“As we progress along this digital transformation journey, it has never been more important to align security and risk postures across new tools and technologies.”

– CVP of Privileged Access Management, Fortune 100 Insurance Company

With full top-down support from the CIO, both the CVP’s security software team and the security risk team began working alongside the RPA team to integrate strong security policies and standards into the RPA program from day one.

A long-time CyberArk user for numerous privileged access management applications across the enterprise and in the cloud, the CVP was impressed by CyberArk’s existing integration with Blue Prism. Confident that CyberArk was the right partner for this important initiative, the team quickly began to deploy the CyberArk solution.

To lock down the firm’s powerful RPA credentials, all software robots must first log in using a shared service account in Active Directory, then log into the specific application server it needs to access. From there, CyberArk continuously monitors and controls all privileged access activity within that server with the CyberArk Privileged Access Manager Solution. This eliminates the need to put a powerful credential – such as a domain credential – into the application’s server for the robots to utilize. Additionally, instead of storing credentials within the application, software robots can request and retrieve credentials from CyberArk’s centralized, encrypted vault on demand, via CyberArk Secrets Manager, to perform their necessary tasks.

Results

Combining Blue Prism with CyberArk enables best-in-breed credential management and more secure deployments, while providing the firm’s team with seamless integration into existing CyberArk infrastructure and management policies across the enterprise. Based on the successful Blue Prism POC, coupled with CyberArk’s simple, easy-to-deploy credential management solution, the firm has future plans to automate a host of new jobs and scripts across the enterprise with RPA.

Key benefits

• Quick time to value with simple and fast integration into the BluePrism solution
• Simplified and consistent privileged access management across strategic RPA projects
• Improved workflow and operational efficiency with security built-in