Taking your IT security seriously means managing passwords properly; centralised password management could be the answer.
Inventing passwords is an increasingly annoying part of life online. It’s tempting to take short-cuts with weak or common passwords. But for a business, ignoring good IT security practices could prove costly, or even lethal.
A multi-pronged approach to cyber security is essential for delivering robust protection, and a centralised password management tool should be a part of your IT strategy.
92% of people know that using a variation of the same password is risky, and yet 65% of us always or mostly use the same password or a variation of it, and 62% of employees say they store login credentials in a notebook.
Centralised password management exists to prevent this sort of behaviour and improve your IT security. It consists of software that lets you to store all your passwords in a single, secure Cloud-based location, known as a “vault”, which can only be accessed with a master password.
In the vault, passwords are encrypted and authenticated by a user’s device or devices, so that only those people with the required permissions can gain access.
We’ve already mentioned their importance to IT security, but centralised password management systems offer other benefits:
Having a centralised password management tools delivers important functions for password security and this delivers many benefits for your business:
1) It makes password management for your team easier, with security taken care of behind the scenes. The primary “vault” holder has access to the main software but when your team members are accessing software or apps they will have access to the password with ease, while you control the back end.
2) Tighter control over access will increase your security. This can be challenging when employees join and leave and you don’t know their passwords, or they take passwords away with them. This leaves you vulnerable and open to hacking by disgruntled ex-employees.
3) Generating a strong and unique password for each account keeps them secure and reduces the chances of one or more accounts being hacked.
4) It’s easier to enforce your password policies to drive security and can ensure that all passwords are complex and strong enough, as well as introducing 2-factor authentication.
5) There’s no need to keep resetting passwords, for example, if they get forgotten. This increases team efficiency by making access quicker and avoids calling in IT support to deal with avoidable queries.
6) You can ensure secure password sharing so that teams can create their own shared folders, define their own criteria for who can share the folder and decide whether each person can edit or just view documents.
It doesn’t matter what size your organisation is, everyone is at risk from cybercrime and the threat is increasing. Businesses need to review continuously how they protect themselves from this ongoing risk, identify all possible IT security weaknesses in their systems and implement a range of robust systems; a centralised password management tool has a key role to play in this.
Changing working patterns, with more employees working remotely or from home and on their own devices, introduce more security risks into your business. Tightening control over passwords is becoming increasingly important when employees aren’t working directly under the IT security umbrella of your work premises.
Any tool that allows you and employees to track, store, share, protect and manage all password will benefit your business by reducing the chances of a cyberattack, accidental leak or malware, with all the costs around operational downtime, lost data, reputation damage and even legal action.
Our IT security experts at Syn-Star spend much of their time providing IT training, supporting businesses to achieve their Cyber Essentials accreditation and providing consultancy services to improve their defences against cyber attack, but the first step that all businesses can take is to improve their password practices.
If you would like to talk to us about introducing a centralised password management system, or any other aspect of your IT security, then contact us today and talk to one of our experts.
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