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LastPass for Your IT Team vs. for Your Whole Organization 

Rose de FremeryOctober 03, 2022
As an IT professional, you know how crucial it is to have the right tools to do your job. If you're already using a password manager to secure your admin passwords – a great move, by the way – then you already understand how it benefits your team. But did you know that a password manager for your whole organization can help your IT department achieve its goals on an even broader scale? Here's how you can leverage this multi-faceted tech tool to reduce the chances of a data breach, save your IT team time on password resets, and automatically promote good password hygiene across the entire organization.

Avoid costly data breaches

When you look at an IT team's list of priorities, preventing a data breach is usually at or near the very top. Unfortunately, data breaches are becoming more frequent and more costly. According to IBM's 2022 Cost of a Data Breach Report, the average cost of a data breach in the US reached $4.35 million in 2022 – an all-time-high – and 83% of organizations have experienced more than one breach. What's more, the use of stolen or compromised credentials is still the most common cause of data breaches. This kind of breach also has the longest lifecycle. It takes 243 days for the IT team to identify the breach, and then another 84 days to contain it.  When you tally up the staff hours involved in these tasks, chances are you're looking at a fair amount of money. This is to say nothing of the regulatory and legal penalties that the company may have to pay out depending on the nature of the breach. All these costs quickly add up, giving IT teams and finance officers everywhere sticker shock as they contemplate the potential bottom line impact. These figures also make it clear that, in the worst-case scenario, doing nothing could mean losing everything. The good news is that although breaches are a fact of life, there is a cost-effective way to reduce your company's chances of falling victim to one. IT can use a password manager to gain complete administrative oversight and perform essential daily tasks via a single admin console. From this console, IT can oversee all employee password management, update security policies, provision, and deprovision users, deploy authentication methods for onboarding and offboarding, and much more. A password manager also provides IT with granular insight into users' password behavior to better understand risk and ensure compliance. Over the long term, investing in a password manager for companies is a far more cost-effective option than the alternative – contending with a potentially business-ending data breach.

Save time on password resets

Even before the rise of remote work, IT teams spent a considerable amount of time helping employees reset their passwords. Seventy percent of people spend more time online than in the previous year, and they have 50% more accounts to show for it. People now manage up to 50 accounts that are protected by passwords, and they have to reset their passwords five times a month when they forget them. As password reset requests stream into the help desk queue, IT finds itself devoting more and more resources to a rote task instead of pursuing strategic initiatives that protect the business and advance its goals. The company as a whole also loses valuable productivity when employees have to wait for someone else to reset their passwords for them. With a password manager for the whole organization, IT can give every user their own personalized, encrypted vault for securely storing passwords. With this self-service tool available 24/7, employees can update their passwords on their own without having to wait for someone from IT to take care of it. Crucially, IT can still maintain oversight of the organization's overall password security using its admin dashboard. The IT team can also use a password manager for companies to enable integrated single sign-on (SSO) across key business applications, easing the burden of password resets even further. IT can even use a password manager to help the organization go entirely passwordless, simplifying the employee login experience and making it possible to set even stronger policies that improve the company's cybersecurity.

Promote good password hygiene 

When users don't understand the importance of good password hygiene or they perceive it as too labor-intensive, they usually won't take the trouble to engage in it. Ninety-two percent of people know that using the same password or a variation of it is risky, but 65% do it anyway. In addition, only 32% of work-related accounts have a strong password attached to them. Poor password hygiene has dire consequences – a whopping 80% of data breaches are caused by weak, reused or stolen passwords according to the Verizon Data Breach Investigations Report Fortunately, IT can use technology to automatically promote good password hygiene, saving time and enhancing convenience for everyone involved. By putting a password management tool in the hands of every employee, IT can eliminate password re-use. A password manager immediately alerts each employee if a password is being re-used or if it is weak, letting them automatically generate a new, secure password to take its place. From there, the employee can store their new password in the encrypted vault and get on with their day.  Sometimes employees adopt poor password behaviors because they don't have a safe alternative. For example, employees often share team passwords with one another using e-mail or Post-it Notes when they can't figure out a secure way to do it. With a password manager, however, they can quickly and safely share credentials – and IT won't have to worry about the potential implications of passwords being intercepted by unauthorized third parties and putting the organization at risk.   Over time, a password manager can evolve from a useful tool to a strategic asset. Beyond just securing employee passwords, it can gently and consistently teach users good password habits on IT's behalf, gradually improving the organization's overall password hygiene. In this way, a password manager can help a company make cybersecurity education a priority

Improve your organization's security with a password manager

If your IT department is already using a password manager to keep admin passwords secure, then you already know how handy it is in a team setting. In truth, though, a password manager for the whole organization can benefit IT teams in multiple ways – from the tactical level, such as automating employee password resets, right on up to the strategic level, such as promoting good password hygiene across the entire organization. Ultimately, your IT team can even use a password manager to build a culture of cyber resilience, putting your company in a better position to ward off dangerous cyber threats.  This Cybersecurity Awareness Month, learn more about how LastPass helps you improve employee password hygiene and security.