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As agentic automation gains traction across enterprise IT, security concerns are rising just as quickly. AI agents that can assess requirements, make decisions, and execute actions autonomously across systems should understandably make IT leaders uneasy.
Unchecked, an autonomous AI agent can wreak havoc across critical infrastructure and leave significant gaps open to attackers. When things go wrong, the instinctive reaction is often to blame the ‘unreadiness’ of the agents themselves to wield such autonomy.
But in most cases, we suggest, the root of the problem isn’t a security flaw inherent to agentic automation itself. While agentic systems do require careful oversight, they typically do not perform actions beyond those already available to human operators. Instead, the problem is that their speed, scale, and flexibility expose existing and often neglected weaknesses within an organization’s automation governance landscape. What may feel like a security failure introduced by AI is more often a preexisting architectural one.
Over years of working with enterprise IT teams, we’ve found a persistent problem that degrades the productivity of automation efforts, and which is now affecting the security and quality of agentic automation deployments; namely, how access is granted, scoped, and governed across automation workflows.
Why Uncontrolled Access Is the Primary Risk in Agentic Automation
In many organizations, automation evolves reactively, without a single source of truth to standardize best practices or centralized oversight to enforce them. IT teams introduce automations to address immediate operational needs, but often without a structured, long-term view of the automation environment they are collectively building. In this context, access models become difficult to govern.
Permissions are frequently expanded simply to “make things work,” particularly during early automation initiatives or AI pilots. What begins as a temporary allowance often persists long after the original use case, gradually hardening into permanent risk.
Common patterns include:
- Agents running under shared service accounts with broad privileges
- Administrative access granted during development and testing because proper scoping is seen as complex or time-consuming
- Credentials embedded directly within scripts or workflows
The result is an environment in which agents, once deployed, are technically capable of far more than they were ever intended to do.
An agent may:
- Interact with systems that are unrelated to its task
- Pull data from unintended or inappropriate sources
- Execute changes outside its original mandate
- Chain together actions that no human explicitly approved
Trickily, because these actions are automated, they can occur repeatedly before anyone notices. Security teams may know agentic automation exists, but lack clarity around what it can access and why. Tracing the root cause becomes difficult, especially if execution logs are fragmented or ownership of the automation is unclear.
The resulting security and quality issues are therefore primarily an access design problem, rather than a problem with agentic automation itself.
What Well-Governed Agentic Automation Looks Like in Practice
In a well-governed environment, agentic automation operates inside clearly defined boundaries. Creating these boundaries should be a core priority of any automation strategy, as they establish the foundation for automation infrastructure that scales with the enterprise and drives sustained productivity gains.
Key characteristics of a well-governed automation environment, regardless of whether agentic automation is in use, include:
- Centralized execution environments instead of scripts running on endpoints
- Permissions scoped properly, not hardcoded into scripts
- Task-specific privileges rather than persistent admin access
- Consistent enforcement of identity, access, and approval policies
- Comprehensive audit trails that capture every action and outcome
These controls should apply consistently, whether an automation is triggered by a human user, a scheduled task, or an AI agent. In doing so, security becomes predictable, repeatable, and measurable, even as automation efforts expand and agents are granted greater autonomy.
Crucially, this shifts security from reactive approval processes to proactive technical controls. Governance becomes something automation operates within by default, rather than something applied after the fact or dependent on individual discipline and best intentions, which become fallible as operations scale and pressure mounts to deliver automation projects quickly.
This is exactly the model ScriptRunner has helped to establish for customers such as Bechtle.
ScriptRunner provides the execution and governance layer required to make access governance for agentic automation practical at enterprise scale. By centralizing automation execution across Microsoft and hybrid environments, ScriptRunner enables organizations to:
- Define precisely what each automation is permitted to do
- Enforce least-privilege access without embedding credentials in code
- Safely delegate execution to human operators or AI agents without granting elevated permissions
- Maintain full visibility into what ran, who initiated it, and which changes were made
- Apply consistent guardrails across scripts, workflows, and agent-driven actions
This approach removes the traditional trade-off between security and speed. Teams can expand automation with confidence, knowing that access and execution are controlled by design rather than needing constant monitoring and correction after the fact.
If you’re ready to enable agentic automation without exposing your environment to unnecessary risk, book a meeting with ScriptRunner today.