The Impact of Robotic Process Automation (RPA) on Identity and Access Management

11 December 2025. The Hacker News notes that as organisations refine their handling of Non-Human Identities (NHIs), Robotic Process Automation (RPA) has become a powerful tool for streamlining operations and enhancing security, but bots with varying access must be governed to mitigate risks.

In large organisations, bots can outnumber human employees, and without proper identity lifecycle management these NHIs can widen security gaps, with RPA impacting Identity and Access Management by managing bot identities, enforcing least-privilege access and ensuring auditability across all accounts. RPA bots act as NHIs and require governance just as human users do for authentication, access controls and privileged session monitoring, including provisioning and deprovisioning and secure credential handling.

Best practices include treating bot identities as first-class identities with unique credentials, using a secrets manager to centrally manage credentials, and implementing Privileged Access Management (PAM) with JIT access and session monitoring, alongside MFA for humans managing bots and Zero-Trust verification throughout sessions. The KeeperPAM platform is highlighted as a means to close security gaps by unifying credential management and monitoring across identities.