Quick tips to secure and share your information online

As our personal and business lives move more online, we need better ways to secure and share sensitive information. This might be anything from login details for an online service to confidential documents. On the personal side, we might need to store and share our tax returns, drivers licenses and passports, credit card authorization forms, and more recently vaccine cards. Businesses need to protect all information where unintended release could damage the organization.

In this post, we’ll explore how to evaluate secure sharing options and how Bitwarden fills the needs of both individuals and organizations.

Keep the following recommendations in mind when identifying the right secure information sharing solution for yourself or your organization

1. End-to-end encryption
   Solutions should maintain end-to-end encryption when handling sensitive information. This ensures that the details remain safe and secure from unauthorized access.

2. Long term sharing
   Solutions should provide a mechanism to share credentials or information long term with other individuals or groups, including the ability to segment and organize access across one or more people. These solutions should support automatic syncing of updates to the information, so everyone is always up-to-date.

3. Short term temporary sharing
   In cases where you need to send something quickly and only once with another party, temporary sharing makes the most sense. Combining end-to-end encryption with automatic expiration offers double protection against the information becoming accidentally exposed.

4. Provisions for digital legacy
   When making the investment to organize your sensitive information, you will also want to consider options for handing off access in the event of unforeseen circumstances. Also referred to as Emergency Access, this capability allows you to assign a delegate to access your secure information if you cannot.

Bitwarden provides several ways to help everyone achieve secure retention and sharing of sensitive information. These include options for individuals within our Basic Free Account, and our Premium Features option for file attachments, both within your vault and when using Bitwarden Send. Bitwarden also expands capabilities for administering groups with Teams and Enterprise Organizations for scalable secure sharing.

Here is what is possible:

With a Bitwarden Basic Free Account you can store items such as Logins, Secure Notes, Identity, and Credit Card information in your Personal Vault, and sync those details across an unlimited number of devices, with complete end-to-end encryption. This means that Bitwarden cannot see the details of your items. Only the owner, who has the combination of the email and master password to the account, can see the Vault contents.

The ability to attach files to your Vault items and using Bitwarden Send is included with a Bitwarden Premium,Teams or Enterprise subscription.

For long term sharing, Bitwarden utilizes Organizations. Organizations are entities created to share items among users. Within Bitwarden, there is a free Organization that enables 2 Users and 2 Collections. Collections organize items together, similar to a shared folder. There are also paid Organizations for Families, and Teams and Enterprise Organizations for businesses.

Within and Organization you can assign the right access to the right people with common role-based access control principles. For example, some users may have read-only access to select information, while others may have write access too.

These days we’re all engaging and collaborating more online, which often requires sharing secure information with work colleagues or family members, as well as in commercial exchanges with service professionals such as accountants, real estate agents, or healthcare providers.

Bitwarden Send is an end-to-end encrypted method to share secure information with anyone via a unique link. The access to the link and information is tightly controlled by the originator, and can be set to automatically expire within a period of time. This ensures that even if the Bitwarden Send link remains within an email or messaging system somewhere, the information it references will no longer be accessible.

Bitwarden Send is an ideal solution to share one time sensitive information quickly and easily with anyone, in a controlled manner. For more information on Bitwarden Send please see this post.

Should there ever be a time when you cannot access your Vault, having a delegate assigned ahead of time using Emergency Access can make things easier for loved ones and colleagues.

Emergency Access is a feature included with a Bitwarden Premium Account, also included for users of any Teams or Enterprise Organization. For more information on Emergency Access, please read the launch blog post.

If you’d like to start sharing information securely today you can sign up for an account, or launch a free trial for a Teams or Enterprise Organization.