3 Building Blocks of a Secure IT Automation Environment

Keep Your Workflows Safe

If someone were to ask you, “What is the biggest concern or problem businesses deal with today?” what would you say? A lot of people would respond that businesses worry most about profit, cutting costs, employee efficiency, or maybe customer satisfaction. What most people don’t realize is that while these are all points of concern, there is one pressing issue that can bring businesses to a screeching halt and sully reputations: Security. 

In this day and age, security breaches and cyber-attacks occur all the time. According to Gartner, 70% of businesses have had to go into disaster recovery due to breaches in the past two years alone.

If organizations want to be successful, they must protect their network and data simply as a price of doing business. As a result, IT is tasked with identifying both preventative measures to prevent potential security holes as well as reactive measures to help trace the source and remedy the situation in the event a breach occurs.

It may seem difficult for businesses, especially large and global organizations, to gain control over their security, but in fact a modern IT automation solution can provide a higher level of security to ensure that an organization’s network and data are protected. There are 3 building blocks you should look for in a workload automation solution.

1. Simplify User Management with Windows

The first aspect to look out for is a solution that supports the Window’s security model or another model your organization is familiar with or currently using, so IT can make use of existing accounts or groups they may have within Kerberos and Active Directory for simpler user management.

2. Enhance Credential and Password Management

The second key factor to look for is a solution that offers integrations with credential and password management software to ensure a highly secure IT environment. For example, static or shared credentials can be a point of weakness for many businesses, exposing them to risk and malicious threats. An automation solution that supports secure credential management software, can improve security even more by automatically pushing out dynamically changing user credentials, minimizing maintenance for IT Operations and reducing the risk of breaches due to static or shared credentials.

3. Full Audit & Revision Capabilities

The third function to look for in an automation solution is audit and revision capabilities. Through these capabilities, organizations can minimize unauthorized changes to workflows and see a complete history of past revisions to certain objects within workflows. A modern IT automation solution can provide a complete audit trail as well as revision history on each object to allow users to easily track object changes, troubleshoot issues faster and more reliably, and minimize the business impact caused by mistaken changes.

In today’s world, security breaches aren’t a possibility, they are a certainty. All three of these aspects combined can help ensure a safe and secure scheduling environment and minimize the impact of unauthorized or mistaken changes to workflows.