How automation improves security and compliance for your business processes

In this article, we’ll address the main concerns regarding security and compliance measures for business automation. We’ll review how to ensure industry-leading security standards for your documents and data when automating your business processes.

The problem with automation security and compliance

Business process automation solutions are considered the fastest-growing segment on the global enterprise software market today. Quite naturally, business owners and regular users express doubts about whether a particular automation tool is capable of operating at the level of enterprise data security they require.

Despite the implementation of highly-technological automation security measures, such as facial recognition and biometric technologies, even industry giants like Facebook are vulnerable to devastating security breaches. Earlier this year, an entire client list and over 3 billion photos were stolen in a massive security breach at Clearview AI, a facial recognition developer.

Recent trends and security statistics show us that cybercriminals are sophisticated and highly motivated by the rewards that come with gaining access to archives of financial and personal data. What makes matters worse is that many companies implementing automation represent traditionally risk-averse industries, like banking and insurance, that handle large amounts of confidential data on a daily basis.

Security concerns to consider when automating your business

Security concerns and risks vary from company to company. Still, there are several common concerns that are primarily associated with automation:

• Automation bots have privileged access to sensitive credentials required for accessing internal applications and databases. Exposing these credentials can endanger confidential information.
• The bots are granted access to sensitive user data for the purposes of moving that data through a business process, one step at a time. Exposing this information via logs, dashboards, or reports can also lead to compromising security integrity.
• Unauthorized access to business processes — when they can be viewed or used by employees who don’t have permission to do so — may result in a so-called internal security violation.

Addressing these and other potential security concerns will help your business ensure the security of its automated processes. It will also eliminate existing security threats.

How to ensure the security of your automation infrastructure

To successfully fight against malicious intent, an organization must make cybersecurity part of its corporate culture. Usually, this includes things like:

• Identifying potential security risks before automating business processes.
• Addressing risks by analyzing security features offered by the out-of-the-box automation tool and its traceability.
• Identifying critical data and managing document access in combination with encryption.
• Applying best security practices at every stage of automation: workflow setup, adding bots, executing automated business processes, etc.

Following with these steps will protect your entire organization from data loss and cyberattacks that may occur down the road.

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Must-know automation security and compliance basics

Pay attention to document access

It is important to control who can view, modify and share information within your system by establishing user and administrative rights.

With airSlate, you can create and assign roles to certain fillable fields in a document and grant specific access permissions. You can also specify who has access: a single person, multiple people, or all recipients. For instance, if you have a document that should only be accessible by one manager in your company, nobody else will be able to access it.

Encrypt your data

Encryption serves as an extra level of protection for any private customer’s data, payment details, and other confidential data used in automated business processes. Needless to say, such data should only be transferred via secured channels.

We use the Secure Hash Algorithm at 256 bits (SHA-256) for data protection at rest and in transit. airSlate uses Transport Layer Security (TLS) encryption for information and user authentication, provided documents, transmitted to, from, and within airSlate-owned and airSlate-managed hosting environments. The TLS encryption method is used for passing user credentials, authentication, or authorization data for any airSlate hosted web-based application and/or web-services deployment.

Prevent data loss with Audit trails

An Audit trail is a chronological record of all changes made to a file or database. Audit trails are especially helpful when identifying what changes were made to a document and when. Without an Audit trail, any malicious action performed within a system can go completely unnoticed. Thus, Audit trails are valuable for analyzing and detecting unauthorized access, unusual activity, and system errors.

Pay attention to industry-specific compliance

The financial, healthcare, and legal industries have especially strict regulations. Failure to comply results in fines. For example, in the healthcare industry, incompatibility with HIPAA law may cost you from $100 to $50,000. Even a jail term for violating HIPAA is a possibility, with some violations carrying a penalty of up to 10 years in jail.

Not all automation platforms are designed to follow a specific industry’s regulations. Pay attention to the policy compliance tools of your software. In particular, whether it is HIPAA and GDPR compliant, has SOC 2 Type II certification and PCI DSS certification.

In airSlate, customer documents and information are encrypted and accessible only by the customer due to the General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR).

airSlate complies with the Health Insurance Portability and Accountability Act’s (HIPAA) hosting standards for protecting the private health information of patients.

airSlate complies with PCI DSS for every monetary transaction a customer makes.

airSlate also complies with industry standards for security such as SOC 2 Type II, 21 CFR Part 11, and CCPA.

An Audit trail displays the following information:

• Type of activity that took place within a system
• Information about the user who performed an action
• Date and time when the action took place
• Information about login and logout attempts
• Suspicious activities, i.e., improper web-browsing or email use

In addition to the benefits mentioned above, airSlate users can set up custom events to be displayed in the Audit trail using the Add Custom Event to Audit Trail Bot.

Another cool thing about airSlate is that you can check every action that occurred within your workflow by viewing the Bots Log. The Log provides a description of the method, time, and condition under which specific Bots were either executed or not.

While the Audit Trail allows you to access the history of actions performed on your documents, the Bots Log helps you control and check the automation process itself.

In a nutshell

The modern business world demands that a company conform to the strict standards and compliance measures regulating it’s industry if it has plans to stand out and achieve growth.

Fortunately, choosing the right software for your business operations is no longer rocket science.

Become a socially responsible and solid business player, strong enough to be an influencer that inspires change with your own industry leadership.

Learn more about how to strengthen data security policy via the automation of routine processes. Enroll the Digital Security and Compliance course today for free.