We all have a lot of passwords and password security is incredibly important for your business, but remembering and sharing passwords is hard. So we often take a shortcut of using the same password for everything. We all know this is a bad idea and far from a best practice but it is easy and convenient.
These is a better way and something every business should have in place – a password manager.
The biggest reason for using a password manager is secure unique passwords for everything including your website. In most cases your website will contain sensitive customer and lead data that you have a legal responsibility to keep secure and private.
What is a password manager?
A password manager is a small piece of software that generates secure, unique passwords and saves them for you. You can use your password manager to login to websites, database applications and other systems, but it will only show you the password when you need it for logging in. The advantage is that if one of your passwords gets leaked (or stolen) then there is no way anyone else can access those other accounts because they don’t know what the password is.
Taking this a step further most password managers allow you to share access to passwords with your colleagues without revealing what the password is. This is a very secure way of giving access to your key business tools without having to worry about password leaks or changing passwords every time an employee leaves.
What to look for in a password manager
There are a number of password managers on the market and most web browsers include one for free. While we don’t recommend the browsers built in password manager there are a number of good alternatives. When looking for a password manager you need to consider:
- What devices and platforms you use?
- Do you need to share passwords?
- Do you need to securely store things over than passwords?
- Do you need granular sharing controls?
All passwords managers do a good job of storing and retrieving passwords but the above are the defining factors that separate the best from the rest. If you are on a budget, don’t need to share passwords and only use 2 devices then LastPass is free.
For everyone else you will need a paid solution and the 2 big ones that we recommend are:
- 1Password
- Dashlane
Internally we use 1Password as it provides the best mix of easy of use and stores more than just passwords. Included in our 1Password vaults are our business insurance documents, VAT certificates and business credit cards. Information is split across a number of vaults as not everyone in the business needs access to all this information.
While 1Password is our go to option it is not the best for everyone. If you need more granular control of what is shared with your team then LastPass is great for this allowing a single login to be shared or a folder (vault in 1Password).
How to set up a password manager
Every password manager is slightly different but most follow the same kind of setup. You install the application on your computer, add a browser extension and start logging into your accounts. As you login to each account that you have not saved the password manager will prompt you to save the login details for next time.
It is a good idea to change each password as you login for the first time and have your password manager generate a new, secure and random password.
1Password have a great setup video below which covers the basics and some advance details.
A password manager is critical for maintaining website security and you should consider using one. They can also store more than passwords helping you keep important business documents safe for future reference.
