Hey everyone! 👋
I've been absolutely loving Banyan for our zero-trust access, but one operational snag kept bugging me: the manual toil around device posture check failures. Our IT team was getting flooded with tickets every time someone's OS or antivirus fell out of spec, and it was a back-and-forth drain for everyone.
So, over the last few weekends, I built a small orchestration script that hooks into Banyan's API. The idea was simple: instead of just alerting on a failure, why not try to fix the common issues automatically? For example, if a posture check fails because a required process isn't running, the script can now attempt to restart it and then re-run the check. If it passes, the access is granted seamlessly. If it fails again, *then* it creates a detailed ticket for the helpdesk.
The result has been wild. We've seen an 80% drop in related tickets, and the engineers who need access love it because they get unblocked faster, often without even knowing there was an issue. It’s turned a friction point into a quiet, self-healing process.
The script is pretty basic (just Python with some logic for our specific posture rules), but I'm happy to share the approach if anyone's interested. Mostly, I'm curious: has anyone else tackled automating remediation around Banyan? What kind of failures are you seeing most often in your environments? I'd love to compare notes and see if there are other common fixes we could bake in!
good UX is non-negotiable
That's such a clever way to handle it! Turning a simple alert into a self-healing process is brilliant. I'm always trying to automate the "click here, then there" stuff for my team too, but this is next level.
I have to ask - did you run into any pushback about the script making changes automatically? Like, restarting services on someone's machine without them initiating it? I'd love to implement something similar, but I think our security team would want a user prompt or approval step first.
Either way, cutting tickets by 80% is an amazing win. Congrats on shipping something that actually removes friction!
That's a fantastic point about pushback, and it's one I've seen derail similar automation projects. In my experience, the approval question is less about the technical risk and more about the perceived loss of control. The security team might reflexively say no, but framing it as a "user experience enhancement with a safety net" can change the conversation.
I had a client who solved this by implementing a two-tiered remediation. The script would first attempt "safe" actions, like restarting a user-space service that could be done without elevation. For anything requiring admin rights or touching core system files, it would instead pop a very clear, self-service notification to the user: "Banyan needs to update X to grant access. Click here to approve." This gave the user agency and created an audit trail, while still automating the workflow. It cut tickets by almost as much as a full-auto approach. The key was showing the security team the exact logic tree and the clear off-ramps before a single line of code was written.
Have you found a particular argument or data point that helps get security folks comfortable with this kind of proactive automation?
Implementation is 80% process, 20% tool.
The two-tiered approach you described is spot on. It's basically the same logic I use for cost anomaly auto-remediation - you don't let a script go terminate a prod instance, but you can let it stop a dev box that's been running for 400 hours.
For getting security onboard, I've found raw numbers beat any framing. Show them the average ticket resolution time *before* automation (like, 45 minutes of IT time wasted) versus the 90-second automated self-service flow, and map that to reduced risk exposure. A device non-compliant for 45 minutes is a bigger hole than one that's non-compliant for 90 seconds while a user clicks "Update Now." Turns the conversation from "you're taking control" to "you're shrinking our attack surface faster." Funny how that works.