Today’s organizations are a study in change: New employees and contractors come on board, some leave, others transfer, while responsibilities continuously shift within the organization. Throughout all this change, password policies continue to enforce password changes, prompting endless calls to an already overburdened help desk.
For IT professionals, the challenges are efficiently meeting increasing service-level demands, while also enforcing policy and security, maintaining stringent access audit controls, and addressing access governance and risk compliance requirements.
Luckily, self-service, automated password reset tools exist to unburden IT professionals, while at the same time ensuring bulletproof security.
But it’s not enough to simply purchase and install a password management solution and hope for the best.
Why are passwords so important?
- Stealing passwords and thereby stealing identities
- Passwords ensure the security and confidentiality of data that is stored on various workstations and servers across an organization
- It is your responsibility as a user, to make sure that all your account passwords are as difficult to guess as possible
We all know that a weak or easy to guess password
- can allow viruses to gain access to your computer and spread through the University of Ottawa’s network?
- can allow hackers to use your computer to hack into other computers connected to the University’s network?
- can allow hackers use your e-mail account to send malicious messages to everyone in your address book, Inbox and others?
- can make you legally responsible for any damage caused by someone using your account
Password management solutions have been around for over a decade, but not all solutions are matured and are capable of dealing with all situations, makes it worthwhile to revisit your password management solution, below are some of such scenarios
- With the growing adoption of cloud computing, the number of logins and passwords that employees must use on a daily basis has escalated and is a growing source of frustration and lost productivity.
- The other technology trend that makes it worthwhile to revisit your password management strategy is mobile computing and the widespread usage of smart devices by workers around the world.
- Data from a large number of penetration tests in recent years show most corporate networks share common vulnerabilities. All commercial networks rely on usernames and passwords for authentication at some stage. Understanding how an attacker would approach gaining access to the most common platforms – as opposed to following perceived best practice – will allow you to create and enforce a password policy that will prevent opportunistic password-guessing attacks.
- Ignoring the problems of default credentials presents an attacker with easy targets.
- Senior staff and decision-makers will have access to plenty of sensitive information but often have poor quality passwords.
- When users have many passwords to remember, with complex compositions and frequent changes, they tend to forget their passwords – or write them on sticky yellow labels! This is either an economic headache or a dangerous breach of security!
It is now time for any Enterprises to re-examine their password management solution and demand/ Implement Password Management solutions that increase productivity, strengthen security and improve service for end-users. Large organizations require that solutions are flexible and dynamic enough to reflect all the different options necessary in complex environments
If your password management doesn’t meet any of the least required requirements in today’s world it’s time to Re-examine your password management solution
- Multi-System Password Reset
- Single Password through Password Synchronization
- Enhance Security
- Zero administration
- Help Desk client
- Leverage Your Existing Infrastructure
- Password Self-Service from Anywhere
- Password Policy Enforcement
Subhash is a former Happiest Mind and this content was created and published during his tenure.
