Intelligent Process Automation-based applications, undoubtedly handle the majority of your business-critical content. Thousands, if not tens of thousands, of users access sensitive material daily as vast amounts of content is extracted, transferred, transmitted, and transacted. These applications know who is doing what, to which documents, and when, which is critical to performance, planning, and policing the components of Intelligent Process Automation-based applications. Intelligent Process Automation solutions typically include Intelligent Document Processing (IDP), Enterprise Content Management (ECM), and Robotic Process Automation (RPA) based components.
Monitoring and managing Intelligent Process Automation solution activity is extremely helpful to organizations in the following ways:
1. To Know Your Business Performance and Plan Ahead
Slow content retrieval will undoubtedly frustrate a user and diminish performance. Managing the time it takes to process documents—for example, receiving payments, approving loans, reviewing design specifications, and reading lab reports—is critical to business success. User response time impacts Service Level Agreements (SLAs); thus, if any issues with service levels arise, knowing the user response time will assist in identifying and resolving those issues promptly and avoiding disruptions.
Besides understanding response times, growth planning also depends on a good grasp of the extent of user activity. When it comes to capacity issues, knowledge of transaction volumes and repository usage is needed to head off performance problems that could impact user satisfaction. You want to understand performance trends while proactively monitoring and analyzing user activity; this will give you the insight to scale content management systems effectively.
In addition to scaling, insight into user activity helps with resource allocation decisions. Understanding peak activity periods and frequently accessed content types will be very helpful for planning infrastructure investments. Auto Scaling server or container capacity and optimizing database performance both rely on knowledge of user activity to prevent slowdowns and outages.
2. To Dramatically Reduce Mean Time to Detection (MTTD) of User Issues
The time it takes from when a problem first emerges to when it is detected — Mean Time to Detection (MTTD) — will be greatly reduced by leveraging information about user activity. Correlating user activity with repository and infrastructure performance at the time a threshold is exceeded will boost investigating efforts. If a response time surpasses the acceptable limit, a monitoring system will log those details in real-time, allowing for immediate diagnosis and swift resolution.
User activity data can also reveal performance bottlenecks and errors, helping to reduce downtime and service interruptions. In addition, integrating user activity data with fault domain identification in the IDP, ECM, and RPA platforms will allow for resolutions before larger problems arise, resulting in improved service continuity.
The reduction of MTTD also directly impacts the customer. Faster issue resolution can avoid delays in everything from customer service responses to financial approvals and keep operations running smoothly.
3. To Detect Insider Threats
One of the most valuable reasons for correlating user activity with content context is identifying malicious activity that comes from insider threats. Your data is highly sensitive and must be protected. Recognizing abnormal access patterns is a smart way to be alert for potential security breaches.
Misuse of user privileges and irregular access to sensitive content can be threats from employees or partners. Irregular login attempts, large-scale content movement to endpoint devices, or abnormal document downloads are all signs of possible malicious activity—early detection of these actions is a critical defense component. For optimum protection, monitoring these patterns is advised so that prompt action may be taken and security breaches avoided.
Compliance with industry regulations is another benefit gained by monitoring ECM user activity. Finance, healthcare, and government are under mandates to have strict controls over content access and user activity. Tracking access patterns and flagging anomalies can be done with ECM management solutions, and the information will be helpful for proof of compliance and, therefore, advantageous when it comes to reducing the risk of fines and legal headaches.
Tracking is not the only thing that needs to be done; action is also required when anomalies arise. Time, location, and the device from which content is accessed allow prompt responses to emerging threats. Managing user activity and correlating it with this kind of context is a valuable way to protect sensitive information and assets. Reducing the time to contain an insider threat is a common goal that can be dramatically improved with direct integration with end point detection software agents Advanced end point detection software can be commanded to disable web application access, isolate the device from the network, or immediately scan the device for malware.
Conclusion
Understanding how users interact with Intelligent Process Automation-based applications, systems and managing that activity with context is critical for successful business operations. Growth plans, reduction of MTTD for detecting and fixing critical issues, and content protection against insider threats are all benefits delivered by correlating user activity with context. General purpose web application monitoring will not be enough to get all this done. Instead, let Intelligent Process Automation management solutions provide the visibility and insights needed for optimal performance, sound security, and the ability to scale content services applications. It turns out that the best insights are found in your contextual data, and the ability to leverage that data is also the key to running a secure and efficient system.
The result is the optimization of costs. By allowing organizations to plan infrastructure upgrades strategically, ensure regulatory compliance, and minimize the risk of content misuse, leveraging user activity with context is your ticket to a better bottom line. Performance monitoring, insider threat detection, and regulatory compliance are key components of efficient Intelligent Process Automation-based operations, and a good grasp of your user activity will give you the knowledge to keep it running safely and smoothly.
