Developing Secure and Compliant RPA Bots Starts With AutomationOps

Last year, Gartner posted an article outlining how businesses can ensure security and compliance in robotic process automation (RPA). It’s certainly a topic near and dear to any automation developer’s heart: While RPA delivers greater accuracy and efficiency by automating repetitive and high-volume tasks, if RPA bots are broken or developer credentials are compromised, critical data could be exposed. The good news is there exists a secure and compliant approach to developing and deploying RPA bots — “AutomationOps” — and it draws on tried-and-true DevOps and GitOps best practices.

DevOps + GitOps = AutomationOps

Robocorp puts the power of automation in the hands of developers and teams by allowing them to build and operate their own RPA bots. Of course, this liberty is not without its perceived challenges — namely, ensuring security and compliance. Sebastian Toro, VP of Partnerships at Robocorp, said, “Everyone should be able to own process automation, but it needs to be in a structured environment. When you enable citizen development and supply one bot per employee, you also give employees the opportunity to commit errors a hundred times faster. So, there must be a control tower governing the experience.”

He’s not wrong. And that’s where Robocorp’s own “control tower” — AutomationOps — comes into play. AutomationOps addresses Toro’s concern by leveraging DevOps and GitOps best practices to ensure the secure and compliant development of RPA bots. 

DevOps is a framework that enables organizations to work collaboratively to develop and deliver secure software faster and more efficiently. In DevOps, security isn’t an afterthought. Failsafes are part of every stage of the software development process, from documenting requirements to automating testing that validates those requirements. This ensures that new code and features actually work exactly the way they are designed. It also ensures that bugs, security threats, and compliance issues haven’t been created along the way.

Where DevOps is the engine that drives agility and security in software development and deployment, GitOps is the engine that drives agility and security in infrastructure design and deployment. Similar to DevOps, the GitOps framework’s goal is to reduce risk and errors in code. Using Git’s features makes it possible to see the complete change history for the organization’s infrastructure code, and teams can roll back to an earlier version if necessary. Git also makes it possible to perform code reviews on infrastructure, which is key to ensuring bad application code doesn’t make it into production.

Taken together, DevOps and GitOps best practices are the foundation of Robocorp’s AutomationOps approach to RPA bot development. And, of course, with greater security comes better compliance — with regulatory, industry, and internal requirements — that is critical across industries but especially in finance, insurance, and healthcare. 

Competitors offer drag-and-drop platforms for building bots, which makes it difficult to ensure security or monitor aberrations in bot code or even who may have injected malicious code into a system. With AutomationOps principles as a foundation for building and deploying RPA bots, Robocorp ensures advanced logging to control users’ access and their ability to make changes. It ensures all credentials and actions are logged for easy identification and remedy. Automation developers know exactly who made what change to what code and where.

The Bottom Line

Automation developers need only look to the success DevOps and GitOps principles have brought to software development and infrastructure deployment, respectively, to find the same success in secure RPA bot development and deployment. This is where Robocorp can help. With its AutomationOps approach, Robocorp sets a new bar in the RPA industry and lays the foundation for greater RPA security and compliance in the future.

Let’s automate

Robocorp is the leader in open-source Gen2 RPA – with hundreds of customers – from Fortune 500 enterprises to start-ups – that are augmenting or replacing UiPath, Blue Prism, Automation Anywhere – or simply want to start their automation journey with a more modern platform. Let us show you how the next generation of RPA and AutomationOps far exceeds the capabilities and security of traditional automation providers at a fraction of the cost.

Visit https://robocorp.com/talk-to-sales to learn more.