How to Manage Passwords at a Business Level

Keeping hundreds or thousands of employee passwords safe is no easy undertaking. The good news is that learning how to manage passwords is surprisingly simple—you don’t have to manage them manually. There are plenty of helpful tools at your disposal, including enterprise password managers: a tried-and-true option that helps businesses keep employee credentials safe and implement password policies.

A password manager can save employee time and your bottom line. Read on to learn how to manage passwords across departments and employees—all of which will require different levels of access to different applications.

Say goodbye to memorization, spreadsheets, and sticky notes. Here are four best practices that can help you set up password management for your business the right way.

A password manager is only as good as the human-first security culture of the organization that uses it. You’ll need to create policies that support and reinforce the use of the password manager, as well as other cybersecurity best practices. Some popular policies that IT admins enact alongside the implementation of a password manager include:

Having one contact person in charge of a company’s password management strategy gives employees a resource to go to with questions about how to manage passwords. Also, this password management champion can play a proactive role in password security.. They can kickstart conversations, communicate policy changes and updates, and create a robust security culture. 

While this person is typically an IT admin, it could be anyone. Especially in the cases of small- to medium-sized businesses that may not have a full-time IT admin, the champion can be anyone who has the time or interest.

Onboarding and annual cybersecurity training can provide an opportunity to share updates to best practices, refresh employees’ memories about cybersecurity tools and resources, and answer questions about how to manage passwords. These sessions should educate employees on the why and how of password best practices. Plus, they should include how to identify and avoid cyberattacks such as phishing and ransomware.

Password managers like Dashlane offer IT admins analytics tools that provide a snapshot of business security practices and weak spots. These reports will be helpful when determining what kind of annual cybersecurity training an organization needs.

Enterprise password managers work by encrypting all employee passwords for extra layers of security. Encryption works like a secret code, scrambling employees’ passwords a different combination of letters, numbers, and symbols before they’re stored. This secret code can only be unencrypted by the password manager. Thus, even IT admins are unable to retrieve a password from the database. Many password managers for businesses, like Dashlane, are built with this “zero-knowledge architecture” to ensure employee passwords stay safe.

In addition, the right business password manager will balance security with ease of use, because a password manager is only effective if employees use it. Dashlane’s password manager has multiple layers of encryption, but Dashlane also prioritizes an intuitive user experience. With the ability to organize separate business and personal passwords under the same account, employees love using Dashlane both in and out of the office. 

Password managers can go above and beyond secure password storage to:

Dashlane rolls all these features into one powerful tool, helping IT admins effectively implement and monitor best practices across the organization.

By offering password health analytics tools and reporting on top of secure password storage, password managers help IT admins track progress toward cybersecurity goals.

By automating the login process, password managers can reduce time spent creating and protecting passwords or calling the help desk for password resets. Plus, since password managers also offer a simple format for collaborating and sharing passwords with team members, productivity increases.

Because password managers automatically populate a user’s credentials, employees are incentivized to create complex passwords they don’t have to remember. Password managers help employees manage their passwords and avoid creating common passwords, reusing passwords, or writing them down. Given that the most common passwords are some of the easiest to remember, a complex and unique password will help accounts stay secure.

Within six months of a cyberattack, an estimated 60% of small- to medium-sized companies go out of business. With 61% of data breaches involving compromised credentials, password managers can play a major role in avoiding a data breach. And consumers pay attention to cybersecurity; 83% of consumers prefer to do business with companies that prioritize data protection.

Company password managers come with many tools and resources IT admins can use to implement a robust password management system. Be sure to select a password manager that balances ease of adoption with strong, real-world security features. As you address how to manage passwords and research different solutions, below are some features your password manager should have:

Dashlane

Dashlane is a web and mobile app that simplifies password management for people and businesses. We empower organizations to protect company and employee data, while helping everyone easily log in to the accounts they need—anytime, anywhere.

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