7 Reasons Why You Need a Password Manager

02/06/2024 12:42 - By Bill

Researchers attribute 80% of all breaches to weak passwords. These seemingly innocuous combinations—birthdays, pet names, or “12345”—become gateways for cybercriminals. They exploit lists of commonly used passwords and employ simple hacking tools to guess their way into accounts. Imagine someone getting rich by cracking passwords and draining bank accounts.

Monitoring your employees' password habits can be a daunting task without a password management solution in place. A business password manager grants organisations full control and oversight of their employees' password behaviours. The process of onboarding and offboarding employees is also streamlined. Continue reading to discover the functions of a password manager and how it can advantage your organisation.

What Is a Business Password Manager?

A business password manager is a tool that enables you and your employees to track, store, share, protect, and manage all passwords. Passwords are kept in a secure, cloud-based digital vault, accessible only with a master password. This vault can also store more than passwords, including documents, identity cards, and SSH keys, thus streamlining the security of your employees' files and passwords. Additionally, a password manager facilitates the creation of strong, unique passwords for each account, securely storing them.

Password managers play a vital role in maintaining the security of your organisation and simplifying the management of your employees' passwords. They also negate the need for employees to submit help desk tickets for password resets.

Benefits of Having a Password Manager For Your Organisation

Unsure of how a password manager can benefit your organisation? Consider these six advantages of deploying a business password management solution.

1. Enforce Organisation Password Policies Efficiently

Centralising password management within a single platform enables organisations to standardise and implement password security policies throughout the organisation. This includes setting a minimum password length and mandating the use of Multi-Factor Authentication (MFA) for every compatible site.

Employing a password manager permits IT administrators to verify compliance with organisational password policies among all employees.

2. Visibility Into Password Practices

Without centralised password management, IT administrators lack insight into employees' password habits. This issue of visibility is increasingly critical with the rise of remote work. It will prevent your employees reusing the same password across various sites and applications. Password managers offer a centralised console that grants administrators full visibility into employees' password practices, regardless of whether they are working in the office, remotely, or using a hybrid approach. Don’t worry the IT administrators cannot see the passwords in a user’s vault.

3. Securely Share Passwords

In businesses, password sharing is essential and crucial for task completion, yet it's imperative that employees have a secure method to share these passwords with their team. A password manager serves this purpose effectively. It enables organisations to establish shared folders for various groups such as individual departments or project teams. Moreover, users can securely share credentials with designated individuals, with the added convenience of automatic credential transfer to the recipient's vault.

Furthermore, our offering of Keeper's password manager provides the option to dictate whether the recipient of shared credentials or folders has the permission to edit or merely view the shared items.

4. Implement Role-Based Access Control (RBAC)

Employees should be granted only the system access necessary for their job functions, nothing more, this is the Principle of Least Privilege. This not only aids in preventing insider attacks but also reduces organisational risk if an employee's account is compromised. Adopting a standardised password management solution allows organisations to enforce Role-Based Access Control (RBAC) and keep track of account activities for any unusual behaviour that might suggest misuse or a security breach.

5. Dark Web Monitoring

Cybercriminals often target Software as a Service (SaaS) developers and other vendors, aiming to steal credentials from their clients' employees. It may take months for an organisation to detect a breach, and usually, the victims of these third-party breaches are the last to realise they've been compromised. Meanwhile, cybercriminals might have already sold the stolen login credentials on the dark web.

BreachWatch, a widely-used extension for Keeper's password manager included in our Enterprise offering, monitors dark web forums and alerts organisations in real-time if any employee passwords or credentials appear online. It integrates smoothly with the Keeper password management platform, allowing IT administrators to promptly enforce password resets.

6. Simplified employee onboarding and offboarding

The use of a uniform password manager streamlines the onboarding process for new hires, facilitating a smooth transition even when the team is partially or fully remote. IT administrators can efficiently prepare new employees for work within minutes by either manually registering each one via the admin console or enrolling multiple users simultaneously using Keeper's supported methods. New employees are welcomed with a personalised email invitation containing a link to set up their Keeper Vault.

Former employees retaining active passwords pose a significant cyber risk, and securing passwords during the offboarding process is vital to an organisation's cybersecurity infrastructure. Upon an employee's departure, their system access must be revoked without delay. Password managers not only enable IT administrators to promptly withdraw access from ex-employees but also offer the option to conceal passwords for current employees within the platform. This measure prevents the copying of passwords through screenshots or written notes and facilitates the secure handover of accounts to successors.

7. Helpdesk Tickets

It is estimated that 40% of help desk calls/tickets pertain to password resets, each costing the business approximately £60. Envision a scenario where a multitude of employees are synchronised on a 90-day password renewal cycle; the impact on productivity could be substantial.

IT support teams can be targeted with social engineering attacks aimed at password resets, they typically rely on static data to confirm an employee's identity, a password manager such as Keeper mitigates that risk.

Consider the potential accomplishments of your support team with a decrease in password reset calls/tickets!

Choosing Keeper as Your Organisation’s Password Manager

Keeper's Enterprise password management solution offers all the essential features required in a password manager, plus many additional benefits. The Keeper password manager operates on a zero trust and zero knowledge basis, ensuring that only the end user can access the plain-text data in their Keeper vault—Keeper's employees included.

With Keeper for Business, every employee receives Keeper across an unlimited number of devices, ensuring comprehensive protection throughout the company. Moreover, it includes a complimentary family plan for every employee.

Contact our friendly Cyber Security specialists at Actisoft today to find out how Keeper Password Manager can help you improve your security posture and protect your users and organisation.

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