Your business is up against some strong headwinds. Cyber attackers are bolder than ever, targeting business of all kinds with increasingly audacious and damaging attacks. Meanwhile, even though employees are aware of the dangers involved with using weak passwords or re-using passwords across multiple accounts, they show no signs of changing their behavior. If you leave password safety up to them, it’s a matter of when you’ll fall victim to a data breach — not if. Here’s how a business password manager can help your company address both of these pressing challenges at the same time and, in doing so, lay the foundation for a password[less] future that is even more secure.
Cybersecurity threats are growing more sophisticated and severe
All businesses, regardless of their size or the industry they’re in, are struggling to protect their critical data from today’s cyber threats. According to the World Economic Forum, the cybersecurity measures that businesses, governments, and individual people take are often outstripped or rendered obsolete by increasingly sophisticated and frequent cyber crimes. When businesses cannot adequately defend themselves from a cyber attack, the impact to the bottom line is swift and severe. The average cost of a data breach in 2023 was $4.45 million, representing a 15% increase over the previous three years. Only 1 in 3 breaches were identified by an organization’s own security teams and tools, while a full 67% of breaches were identified by a benign third party or even the attackers themselves. When attackers disclosed a breach, the total cost was $1 million more than it would have been had the internal team caught it first.
Businesses are particularly vulnerable when it comes to how they manage (or don’t manage) their passwords. Nine out of ten employees know they have a password problem, but they continue to behave the same way. Bad password behaviors such as using weak passwords or re-using one password across multiple accounts make it incredibly easy for malicious actors to compromise credentials. Once they’ve gotten a hold of an employee’s password, they can use it to slip through a company’s cybersecurity defenses, rummage around until they find some juicy data to exploit, or simply hold the entire company hostage with a devastating ransomware attack until they receive a tidy sum of bitcoin. Even when they get the virtual bag of cash they demanded, cyber criminals may or may not release their grip on the company’s systems and data. This is one of the reasons why the FBI advises businesses not to comply with a ransomware demand.
Obviously, when the options for recovering from such a serious attack are this unappealing, the best plan is not to get hacked in the first place. A business password manager can help companies and their employees make meaningful progress toward this goal.
A password manager helps protect businesses data
Rather than simply leaving password safety in the hands of employees, businesses must provide their staff with a better, more secure way to do their jobs. Password management must be a priority, and the easiest way to make it one is to deploy a password management solution across the organization. You can use a business password manager to protect sensitive business, customer, and employee data in several ways. For starters, your employees can use a password manager to store all their passwords in a secure, encrypted vault that they can access from any of their devices. This beats the old-fashioned method of writing passwords down on a Post-it note, which isn’t secure let alone manageable.
Once an employee’s passwords are securely stored in the vault, the password manager automatically fills them in every time the employee needs to log in to one of their accounts. This saves employees time and boosts their productivity, eliminating the need to hunt down a password when they need to access a particular account. A password manager also makes it easy for employees to securely share passwords with each other instead of passing them around by email or chat and unintentionally putting the business at risk. When the password manager spots an insecure password, it can automatically generate a new, secure password to take its place. This takes the guesswork out of trying to come up with a unique password for each online account. A business password manager also monitors the dark web and alerts employees when their accounts have been breached so they can take prompt action before those accounts are compromised in an attack.
IT can also use a business password manager to enforce password policies and access actionable insights into employees’ password behavior from an admin dashboard, quickly uncovering any potential risks to the company. Since 98% of respondents to a study commissioned by LastPass indicated that they see room for improvement in the security behavior of their employees, this is an important capability for IT to have.
Businesses can use a password manager to go password[less]
Not only can you use a password manager to improve the way you manage passwords at your company, but you can also use it to go password[less]. Because passwords can no longer realistically secure accounts on their own, many businesses have added multi-factor authentication (MFA) to mitigate the risk associated with relying on passwords. Soon, many of them will begin passwordless authentication, which allows them to eliminate passwords altogether in many cases. You can use a password manager to start implementing passwordless logins wherever and whenever possible, drastically minimizing the risks arising from weak or compromised passwords.
For example, LastPass now supports FIDO2 compatible authenticators, which can be used to enable passwordless access to multiple accounts — including an employee’s own LastPass vault. Rather than having to remember and then type out a long and complicated password, that employee can simply use biometric authentication such as their fingerprint to access all their credentials in LastPass. With a single tap, they can log in and be on their way.
LastPass will also support passkeys later this year, enabling employees to do away with passwords on many major sites that they use in their work and personal lives. In the near future, your staff will no longer have to keep track of so many passwords just to get their jobs done. Setting up a passkey for an online account is easy, and once the process is complete, that account is far more secure than it would be if a password were involved. Each passkey is unique to each site, which means that even if an attacker were somehow able to steal a passkey, they could not use it to get into another account like they often can with a password.
Each time an employee replaces a password with a passwordless form of authentication, your business risk associated with weak or re-used passwords will decrease a little more. And because employees can use LastPass to create, store, and access passkeys much in the same way they already do with passwords, going password[less] will be relatively straightforward for them.
Protect your business with a password manager
Your business needs to take the time to understand the cybersecurity risks before it, especially given today’s dangerous cyber threat landscape and employees’ continued reliance on bad password habits. A business password manager can help strengthen your cybersecurity posture by easing the burden associated with keeping employee credentials secure. This way, you and your employees can enjoy the peace of mind that comes with knowing you are taking the right steps to keep the company safe. Best of all, in doing so, you can begin laying the groundwork for a password[less] future that is even more secure.
Discover how a password manager can protect your digital business.
