These days, we have passwords for just about everything, from pizza ordering apps and music streaming platforms to online bank accounts, medical records, and more. With so many, it’s hard to keep track of them all, let alone maintain secure password practices. 

Consequently, it’s all too easy (and common) for people to start using the same or similar passwords over and over again—even your employees. However, once one password gets hacked, it doesn’t take much for cybercriminals to figure out additional passwords, leading to major company security breaches. But having a password manager in place can resolve these issues and actually improve your security in the process.

Modern Password Management for Businesses

In seeking better password management for businesses like yours, the first step is to start using a company-wide password manager for all your employees’ various accounts. A password manager is an IT tool that self-generates strong, safe passwords across all accounts that are unique and difficult to hack.

Instead of coming up with individual passwords for every software application, your employees simply need to remember one password to access their password manager. Once logged in, the password manager auto-fills the correct password on the account they’re accessing. There’s no need to keep track of multiple passwords ever again. In other words, a password manager both enhances security and promotes convenience at the same time.

Key Password Manager Benefits to Prioritize

At Affinity Technology Partners, we encourage all our clients to invest in a password manager for their company’s security. But as you explore your options, there are a few specific password manager benefits we recommend you prioritize before making your choice. 

For starters, it’s not good practice for individual employees to sign up for their own password manager and use it for their work accounts. This opens up unwanted security and access issues. The right password manager tool will feature robust, comprehensive administrative controls that can actually prevent your employees from going rogue with their own personal password managers.

In these situations, an IT professional can set up your chosen password manager for the entire company, distribute it to each employee, and give you as the owner (or your designated management team) proper access. After all, administrative access is critical for unlocking employee password manager accounts as needed (and would be extremely difficult to do if an employee has their own individual password manager platform).

Of all the password manager benefits to consider, we also actually support password manager platforms that allow your employees to use the tool for their personal accounts at home. Good password managers that provide this benefit will have a separate password vault that prevents company access. This allows your employees to continue using the password manager for their personal accounts at home once they leave the company—as long as they start paying for the tool themselves.

Secure Password Practices: A Few Dos and Don'ts

As you’re implementing modern password management for businesses in your organization, you’ll want to establish some secure password practices in the rollout process. We suggest you advocate against your employees saving their company passwords on their personal accounts and web browsers, even those at home.

Take Google Chrome, for example. If you save your passwords on Chrome, they’ll be associated with your Gmail account. And if your Gmail account gets hacked, cybercriminals can obtain the company passwords saved in Chrome as well. And then you have a bigger problem on your hands.

To combat this, we recommend you work with IT professionals to remove your web browser’s capabilities to save passwords, and then distribute your chosen password manager platform as the better alternative.

Secure password practices also will block the ability of former employees to continue using their passwords to access your software and corporate accounts after they’ve left the organization. By working with IT professionals like us, you can ensure your company data is properly managed and former employee access is prevented.

The Best Password Management for Businesses with Affinity

To maintain secure password practices today, you need to prioritize modern password management company-wide. By partnering with outsourced IT professionals like Affinity Technology Partners, you can implement the best security measures—including the right password manager for your needs. To learn how Affinity can help improve your company’s cybersecurity, contact our team today.