Blog
Recent
Productivity Tips

How to Safely Share Business Passwords 

Amber SteelFebruary 15, 2022
Keeping everyone in sync is crucial when your team is working on a project. Whether team members work in an office, from their home, or while traveling, they need instant access to the right resources to keep tasks moving along. For a work-from-anywhere team, secure password sharing is instrumental to facilitating better and safer collaboration. With a password manager to share account logins, everyone can access the information they need without sacrificing admin oversight or security.

Why password sharing matters

Passwords are a fact of work life. We use passwords to access company email, the corporate network, cloud apps, databases, subscriptions, client portals, and dozens more accounts in the workplace. As team members collaborate on projects or manage shared tasks, password sharing is often required. The challenge is to share those passwords securely, especially when team members are in different locations. In the past, team members have relied on sticky notes, shared spreadsheets, emails, or text messages to share passwords. Unfortunately, in addition to being insecure, all those methods are tedious time-wasters. Searching out a password every time you need it, bothering team members for the correct password, interrupting your workflow to remember where you can find that password - this style of password sharing is inefficient and disruptive. The lack of encryption or verification also means that data is open to cyberattacks and theft. With 80% of data breaches traced back to poor password management, using a password manager to securely share passwords can reduce your organization's risk of a data breach.

How a password manager helps

With a password manager, users can share a selected password, or even a folder of passwords, with another individual or a group of users. The user can also decide whether others should view the password or not. Strong encryption protects passwords from cyberattacks and prying eyes.  Not only are shared passwords stored and transmitted securely with a password manager, but the whole process of password sharing is also automated. The password manager automatically syncs changes to shared logins, including when someone needs to replace a password with a new one.  Best practices recommend generating a unique password for every account. Because a password manager automatically creates new passwords and autofills them when logging in, users don't have to stress about keeping track of complicated passwords. It's all managed for them. Equally importantly, admins have oversight even when team members share passwords. A password manager ties actions to individuals so that admins can trace any changes or suspicious activities to a specific user.   For example, a company's social media team has multiple contributors. Suppose every team member needs to access the social media accounts. How do you give five people a password without jeopardizing the business's public face? Password sharing can help organizations securely share passwords with everyone involved in the project, so everyone can securely get their work done. On average, a company has 185 shared folders. Using a password manager to implement policies and tracking reports on shared passwords ensures everyone follows security best practices even with that volume of shared credentials. In addition, centralizing the storage of shared credentials into a password manager gives managers oversight of team accounts; admins know who has access to what and can restrict access as needed.  Ultimately, a business password manager is an efficient, secure way to share logins. Without a password manager, employees resort to inefficient, insecure password sharing that puts the company at risk of breach and slows down day-to-day operations. No matter where or when employees sit down to get their work done, sharing passwords through a team password manager keeps everyone up-to-date and instantly connected while prioritizing security and privacy. Want to get started with LastPass today? Click the button below.