Benefits of a Password Manager for Small Businesses

A Password Manager can make life much easier because, I’m sorry to say, Passwords aren’t going away anytime soon.

I’ve discussed what it takes to make a Strong Password and why MFA is a necessity, and solid password manager rounds out that security stack nicely. No one likes passwords, but they are a fact of our digital lives, and with biometric technologies such as fingerprints or face-scanning not yet capable of effectively replacing them, it doesn’t look like there’s anything on the horizon that will take their place anytime soon. Simply put, there is currently no single security method as reliable as a Strong Password. But there is a way to make managing your passwords significantly easier.

Meet The Password Manager

Instead of remembering a whole bunch of passwords, you can remember just one AND still have different passwords for every site. That’s what a Password Manager can do for you! It remembers your credentials and enters your password into the website for you, kind of like having an encrypted book of passwords locked by a master key that only you know.

Best of all, most password managers are plugins that will sync across all of your browsers and computers, with apps for your mobile devices. There are other pros of using a Password Manager, such as:

• Preventing Password Re-Use Attacks: by not having the same password for multiple sites, hackers cannot use stolen credentials to get to your other accounts
• Stop Imposter Sites From Phishing Your Credentials: imposter websites are designed to look like a website in which you have an account to trick you into entering your credentials, but Password Managers won’t enter your password into an imposter site
• Track Services With Which You Have Accounts: can’t remember if you signed up with a particular website? the Password Manager will know, and you can search through it anytime, making it easier to keep track of accounts you use and close or delete accounts you don’t use
• Alerts For Compromised Services: the vast majority of Password Managers will let you know if a particular site or organization with which you have an account has experienced a data breach
• Password Security Monitoring: has it been a couple of years since you changed the password for a social media site or an account you don’t often use? Most Password Managers know and will tell you, and they’ll let you know if a particular password is weak

As you can see, Password Managers can do a lot for you, though there are some cons.

Potential Drawbacks Of Using A Password Manager

I’m using the word potential here because most of the drawbacks are directly related to the user, i.e. you and me. The first question that people ask is, “Is it safe to store all my passwords in one place?”

Obviously, if a hacker gets your master password and all of your other passwords are stored in that one place, it could be bad. The thing is, the security of the Password Managers themselves has proven to be pretty darn robust. If your master password gets compromised, it’s most likely going to be because you didn’t use a Strong Password, re-used a password that had already been compromised, or were successfully Phished. In other words, it’s most likely going to be Human Error. Keeping that in mind, the whole point of the Password Manager is to keep all of your passwords in one place to manage them more efficiently.

As we said, there are a few other potential drawbacks, so let’s get into them:

• Adding Logins: adding all the information from all of your existing accounts into the Password Manager can be time-consuming and requires you to remember every place where you have an account
• Remembering The Master Password: since all of your other passwords rely on the master password, if you forget it, getting back into the account will not be easy; these companies are constantly under attack, so you are going to have to go through multiple verification processes to get it to reset
• Password Security Alerts: most Password Managers are going to tell you when a password is being used on multiple sites, a password hasn’t been changed in a while, a password is too weak, etc.; the sheer number of alerts can cause people to start ignoring them
• Outages: like all other services, Password Managers will have the occasional outages, though the companies have backup servers and try hard to make sure scheduled outages occur in off-hours to minimize the potential impact
• Autofill Blocked: some websites won’t play nice and will block the autofill, though you can still go into the Password Manager to copy and paste the site password if you can’t remember it

Reviewing these potential drawbacks, most of them come down to how serious you are about the Password Manager. Jumping in halfheartedly can sully the experience for many users, and something like forgetting the master password can cause people to throw their hands in the air and quit the Password Manager altogether. For this reason, if you’re not 100% convinced a Password Manager is for you, it’s a good idea to start slow, adding lower value passwords to see how it works and how you like it.

Real Password Managers Vs Browser Password Managers

You can’t use a web browser without being asked if you want it to remember your password. Chrome. Firefox. Edge. Safari. No matter what browser you prefer, they have a built-in password manager. The thing is, these browser-based password managers aren’t as secure as they you want to believe.

Web browsers are a very common target for cybercriminals, wth significantly more security issues than Password Managers. A zero-click vulnerability can immediately compromise all of the passwords you have stored in the browser without any interaction from you. In addition, while the website browsers do have a degree of security, they lack the robust encryption and reset security of Password Managers.

Password Managers Continue to Improve

Over the past few years, Password Managers have evolved; not only do they create and securely store strong, unique passwords, many now include additional security features that help protect your accounts before something goes wrong. Most will alert you if one of the websites you use has experienced a data breach, tell you when you’re re-using passwords across multiple accounts, and warn you if a password is weak or has gone unchanged for too long. Many also make it much easier to enable MFA, and some now support passkeys, a newer sign-in technology that is beginning to replace passwords on many major websites.

The important thing to remember is that Password Managers aren’t becoming obsolete because technology is changing; they’re adapting along with it. Whether you’re managing a handful of personal accounts or hundreds of business logins, they’re still one of the easiest ways to improve your security without making your life more complicated.

Recommendations

Many Password Managers are available, and that list seems to grow daily. The best one is more a matter of feature and cost preferences than functionality, though some are more intuitive or easier to use than others. After researching a number of options, I have some recommendations:

Best for Small Businesses: 1Password. I came across this one doing support; it doesn’t have a free version, but the paid version is affordable for smaller organizations, with an intuitive interface and the ability to easily share passwords and secure data with others in and outside of the organization.

Easiest to Use: Bitwarden. A popular recommendation in the security community, this one is open source, independently audited, inexpensive, has an excellent free version, and the paid version is only a few dollars a month. While the interface isn’t quite as polished as 1Password, it is very easy to use.

Most Features: Dashlane. Perhaps the most robust Password Manager currently available, this one offers numerous features, including dark web monitoring, a built-in VPN, and options for free and paid plans, though it does have a higher learning curve for beginners.

You can’t go wrong with any of these options, and if you’d like help narrowing down the choices, setting one up, or training your staff on how to use your Password Manager, we have the expertise to get you up and running quickly. Give us a call at 301-456-691 or send an email to [email protected] for a free quote, and see why Clark Computer Services is simply the best choice for IT Services.