Five Best Practices for Enterprise Password Management

While organizations continue to make security a priority, an important part of that effort involves educating and empowering general users about best practices. Consider some of these statistics from the Yubico 2019 State of Password and Security Authentication Security Behaviors Report:

• 2 out of 3 respondents share passwords with colleagues

• 51% of participants said they reuse passwords across personal and business accounts

• 57% said they did not change their passwords after experiencing a phishing attempt

To bring change to an enterprise, security and IT teams must educate employees about best practices. In regards to password management, one of the easiest ways to encourage good password hygiene is to deploy a password management solution across your workplace. Here are some best practices to adopt.

Throughout the day most people visit many different sites that require passwords. Memorizing many unique and sufficiently strong passwords (or passphrases) is virtually impossible. A password manager simplifies password use across different sites to keep users more secure. There are a number of solid password managers out there. Prioritize those that work cross-platform and offer services for individuals for free or at a very low cost. Most password manager capabilities have also expanded over the years.

Password managers need to be easy to use for every level of user–from beginner to advanced. When considering a large or distributed employee-base, the applications should be user intuitive and easy to deploy. For example, whether you choose the Bitwarden Cloud or deploy your own self-hosted instance, getting Bitwarden up and running is easy. And Bitwarden Directory Connector works with today’s most widely used directory services such as Azure, Active Directory, Google, Okta and others, to keep your Bitwarden users in-sync with your teams and employees.

The days of changing your password every three months are over. You should now only change them if you think you’ve been compromised. The National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST) doesn’t recommend that users change passwords frequently. This actually leads to behavior that may result in weaker passwords over time. You can determine if a password has been compromised by referencing tangible evidence, such as credit card fraud, or using a tool (like your password manager) that can tell if your password was exposed in a breach.

Using strong, unique passwords for every service you use online helps minimize the impact of data breaches. A strong password doesn’t necessarily mean just adding special characters or numbers to a common word or name, it means increasing the password’s entropy, or randomness. One easy tactic for creating a strong password is to use a passphrase. A passphrase combines seemingly unrelated words or phrases that are easily memorable to the user but would otherwise be hard to guess by an attacker. Passphrases have a high degree of entropy while also being easy to remember.

With two-factor authentication (2FA) becoming more common across consumer and business websites, a good password manager will include ways to expand on this function. Using 2FA increases the security of your account by requiring you to enter another token beyond supplying your master password. Even if someone were to discover your master password, they could not log into your password manager without access to the additional token. If you’d like to get started with a password manager, you can sign up for a free Bitwarden account here.