Password Management for Your Business

Gone are the days of simple passwords. I remember the days (yes I am showing my age here), where everyone had the same password for everything. If you were security conscious you had a different password for the “less secure” account and had another password for all the other accounts. If you are still doing that then I officially name you the Gambler. You would be surprised by how innocuous accounts lead hackers to other accounts until the eventually get into something that causes you real pain. But the question is how to stop this. Well, there are a couple of ways.

1. You can have a piece of paper with all your passwords written down. Some people might scoff at this, but honestly this is a very good way. If you put it in a safe or hidden location then you will be reasonably secure. Unfortunately, this isn’t convenient, and if you are like me and you accidentally throw it away…three different times… then it can become a royal pain the butt to reset all those passwords.
2. You can use a password manager. For example LastPass or 1Password. They have different ways of doing it, but they allow you to keep your password securely on your computer, in the cloud, or both. This might seems to be less secure, but it is very secure and much more secure than having the same password for every account. This allows you to have different passwords for all your accounts and they autofill them in, so you don’t have to type 16 random character passwords and so the passwords are more secure than, for example, January 2015.
3. Now if you are looking for a password management system for your IT department then you might want to look at something in the enterprise realm. Enterprise doesn’t always equal expensive here, but it normally gives you more functionality. You will want to be looking at things that have SSO (Single Sign On), so your employees can click a button and automatically sign into the site, and you don’t have to set them up beforehand, thus saving everyone a lot of time.

Password management is much more mature now. It isn’t as easy as we would like it, but the small amount of time it takes to login to the password manager when you start up your computer, it is easy to ignore when you realize how much safer you are. Some password management applications even change your passwords regularly, so if it is stolen from a website they won’t have much time to use it before it is changed.

If you want to learn more on how Thrive can help your company implement a password management solution, contact us today!