Fortune 100 Insurance Company Implements CyberArk Blue Prism Integration to Secure RPA Deployments and Accelerate Operational Agility

The customer is a Fortune 100 insurance company, a global provider in the insurance industry with over 10,000 employees. The company is engaged in a multi-year digital transformation journey aimed at achieving agile development at scale. To support this initiative, the application development team has embraced Blue Prism’s Robotic Process Automation (RPA) technologies to automate operational activities, test new applications, and accelerate operational agility. The company has integrated 10 business-critical applications, including SAP, Windows, and Lightweight Directory Access Protocol (LDAP), into the Blue Prism Digital Workforce Platform as part of a proof of concept. The company is highly focused on maintaining a high level of security for its new digital workforce, especially concerning privileged access to robotic credentials.

According to the 2018 Deloitte Global RPA Survey, 53 percent of organizations have already started their RPA journey to help robotize repetitive routine tasks and drive digital transformation. RPA adoption is expected to increase to 72 percent in the next two years, and if it continues at its current level, RPA will have achieved near-universal adoption within the next five years. It’s not hard to see why – the same study points to total ROI in less than 12 months, with significantly improved compliance, quality, accuracy, productivity and cost reduction. 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.

As the company progressed along its digital transformation journey, aligning security and risk postures across new tools and technologies became crucial. With full top-down support from the CIO, 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 security 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 Core Privileged Access Security 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 Application Access Manager, to perform their necessary tasks.

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

• RPA adoption is expected to increase to 72 percent in the next two years.
• Total ROI in less than 12 months.