ServiceNow Integration Improves Service Account Approvals

Many IT operations teams are working hard to move beyond a reactive, service-desk approach. They are taking on broader responsibilities for proactive management and measuring the business impact of their efforts for employees and customers.

For a comprehensive view of IT-related projects, many organizations rely on IT service management systems (ITSM) that account for all activities and results from project initiation through to deployment. Ideally, all communications related to infrastructure, applications, privileged users, and service accounts should be accessible and tracked in a single service management system. With a single system of record instead of multiple silos, IT teams can more clearly see bottlenecks that slow projects down and do all they can to remove barriers to success.

Account Lifecycle Manager integrates with ServiceNow to address a common bottleneck in the IT project workflow: approvals

For 80% or more of IT teams that use service management platforms, ServiceNow is the go-to choice. We’ve integrated with ServiceNow to connect Secret Server’s Privileged Access Management functionality and Privilege Manager’s least privilege and application control tools. Now, Delinea's service account governance solution, Account Lifecycle Manager, integrates with ServiceNow as well to address a common bottleneck in the IT project workflow – approvals.

Why focus on service account approvals?

Service accounts connect applications, databases, root accounts, and other IT systems to share sensitive information and perform business-critical processes. Development teams, cloud management teams, IT security teams, and superusers may want to create service accounts to automate ongoing operations. Yet, these non-human privileged accounts typically don’t have the same level of oversight as privileged accounts which are tied to individual users, and thus can easily be left unmanaged and forgotten. Account Lifecycle Manager helps you get control of service account sprawl and makes sure each service account is tied to an owner, with the proper levels of responsibility and oversight.

In a typical workflow to set up or provide access to a privileged service account, IT teams often require a second layer of approval from a business unit lead or executive before they can move forward. Particularly when remote workers or third-party contractors request privileged access, workflow approvals are critical to maintaining security oversight by an internal team member. Service account approvals may require a review of reasons for the request, evaluation of risk, confirmation of ownership and responsibility, questions about timing and any restrictions, and finally, sign-off. A high-risk approval ticket might be passed back and forth across teams until it’s finally approved. IT operations are left waiting while the clock ticks.

Each step in the approval process is accelerated and IT teams can deliver projects and achieve results faster, with better visibility and tracking

The integrated solution between Account Lifecycle Manager and ServiceNow takes an approval request, identifies the right response team, and automatically triggers communications. Approvers see the request in the same service management system they use for all other requests, so it gets prioritized in their queue and doesn’t get lost in the shuffle. Additionally, the integration provides closed-loop auditing to track approval ticket completion. IT teams can see all approval requests in a dashboard so they can track volume, type, user, and time-to-completion, and see how those change over time. It’s easier to create a comprehensive dashboard of IT activity for executives and demonstrate compliance with Service Level Agreements.

As a result of the integration, each step in the approval process is accelerated and IT teams can deliver projects and achieve results faster, with better visibility and tracking. Across hundreds of service account approval requests, the savings become substantial.

Integration across Delinea’s PAM portfolio with ServiceNow helps IT ops teams partner closely with other business and IT functions as one cohesive unit – not a siloed organization of uncoordinated parts.