Your IT team is drowning in privilege elevation requests. Users need admin rights to install software, update drivers, or troubleshoot their own systems. But every single request creates another ticket, another interruption, another drain on your help desk’s time.
Meanwhile, security can’t budge. Handing out permanent admin rights isn’t an option, not when so many critical vulnerabilities require local admin access to exploit. You need tight control over who gets elevated privileges and when.
So you’re stuck between two bad options: sacrifice endpoint security or watch productivity tank. Or at least, that’s how it feels.
When Help Desk Tickets Pile Higher Than Your Security Standards
In many workplace environments, a single privilege elevation request can take 10-15 minutes to process manually. The user submits a ticket, the help desk reviews it, approves or denies the request, and follows up. With dozens or hundreds of requests per day, that’s hours of help desk time spent on repetitive tasks.
Worse, there’s the context switching and workflow interruptions. Users sit waiting for permission to install software or update drivers. Your help desk becomes a bottleneck for basic productivity.
But you can’t just hand out permanent admin rights. One compromised email attachment or malicious download, and malware spreads with full system access. Ransomware loves privileged accounts for lateral movement and data exfiltration. So security policies stay strict, and the tickets keep piling up.
Can You Automate Something This Critical?
The obvious answer seems to be automation. Let the system handle routine elevation requests, free up your help desk, and keep users moving. But privilege management feels too important to hand over to algorithms.
What if the system approves something malicious? What if legitimate requests get blocked? What if you lose visibility into who’s doing what on your network?
These concerns make sense. Bad automation is worse than no automation. A system that blindly approves every request defeats the purpose of privilege management, while a system that blocks everything legitimate just moves the bottleneck from the help desk to the automation itself.
The trick is finding the middle ground: automation that’s smart enough to handle the routine stuff while keeping humans in the loop for anything risky or unusual.
How Admin By Request Builds Intelligence Into Privilege Management
Admin By Request’s EPM solution doesn’t just automate approvals. It learns from your organization’s actual behavior and combines that with broader threat intelligence to make smart decisions about privilege elevation.
Machine Learning That Adapts to Your Environment
When you enable Machine Learning alongside manual approval workflows, the system starts paying attention to what your team approves. You set the threshold (let’s say 3 manual approvals). The first three times someone requests elevation for a specific application, a human reviews and approves it. On the fourth request, the system recognizes the pattern and approves automatically.
This isn’t a free pass for that application, though. Even after it’s been learnt, every elevation still runs through OPSWAT MetaDefender’s real-time malware scanning. If the file’s checksum suddenly flags as suspicious across any of the 20+ antivirus vendors in the database, the elevation gets blocked or quarantined for review. You can also manually “unlearn” applications anytime you want to revoke automatic approval.
AI Approval Scores for Broader Context
Machine Learning works great for applications specific to your environment, but what about widely-used software that’s new to your organization? That’s where AI Approval comes in.
Every application elevated through Admin By Request’s EPM solution gets assigned an Application Popularity Score (for the specific software) and a Vendor Popularity Score (for the publisher). These scores reflect how many organizations safely use this software across Admin By Request’s entire customer base.
You set the trust thresholds per sub-setting. Maybe you’re comfortable auto-approving any application with a popularity score above 85, or any vendor with a score above 90. If you enable both thresholds, the system uses whichever score is lower for safety. And just like Machine Learning approvals, AI-approved elevations still get checked against OPSWAT’s malware database before execution.
Pre-Approval for Guaranteed Safe Applications
For applications you know are safe and want users to elevate without any delays, Pre-Approval lets you create explicit whitelist rules. You can approve based on file location (like a network share where vetted software lives), vendor certificate, or specific file checksums.
Pre-approved applications can run with or without user confirmation. The “without confirmation” option is useful for things that need to elevate during system startup or automated scripts, where you don’t want user input. Since these applications are explicitly vetted by your team, they bypass OPSWAT scanning to avoid any delays.
Quick Manual Approvals When Automation Isn’t Enough
Not every elevation request can or should be automated. Unknown applications, unusual patterns, first-time software installations – these need human judgment. But that doesn’t mean they need to be slow.
Admin By Request EPM makes manual approvals fast enough that they don’t kill productivity. Portal administrators can review and approve requests from the web interface, and the mobile app means approvals happen even when nobody’s at their desk. Integrations with Teams, Slack, ServiceNow, and Jira push approval notifications into the tools your team already uses.
The result is a system where automation handles the predictable stuff, humans handle the edge cases, and nothing falls through the cracks. Every elevation gets logged and every decision is auditable. Your help desk isn’t buried under tickets for software that’s been approved a hundred times already.
Making It Work in Your Organization
You don’t flip automation on day one. Start with a learning phase where Admin By Request’s EPM solution observes elevation activity without automatically approving anything. This builds a baseline of what’s normal in your environment and lets you identify which applications are requested most frequently.
From there, you can set your Machine Learning threshold higher initially (maybe 10 manual approvals before auto-approval kicks in) and gradually lower it as you get comfortable with the system’s behavior. Same with AI Approval scores – start conservative and adjust based on your security posture and risk tolerance.
And when you combine all three automation methods (Machine Learning, AI Approval, and Pre-Approval) with fast manual reviews, you get privilege management that actually scales. Your users aren’t waiting, help desk doesn’t get overwhelmed, and your attack surface stays minimal. And you’ve got full audit trails showing exactly what happened and why.
That’s how you maintain security without sacrificing productivity.
See It In Action
Want to test intelligent privilege management in your own environment? Our free plan gives you full access to Admin By Request’s EPM solution for up to 25 endpoints, forever. No credit card required, no time limits, no feature restrictions.
You get the same Machine Learning, AI Approval, and Pre-Approval capabilities that enterprise customers use to automate thousands of elevation requests. Set it up in minutes, watch it learn your environment, and see how much help desk time you can reclaim.
Prefer a guided walkthrough? Book a demo with our team. We’ll show you how automation adapts to your specific use cases and answer any questions about deployment, configuration, or integration with your existing tools.
