Benefits of Password Management

As a managed services provider (MSP), it’s your responsibility to help your customers run an efficient and reliable tech infrastructure. To ensure customer satisfaction, any MSP knows that smooth sailing requires a tight security protocol. The first, and perhaps easiest, way to maintain safety against attackers is to ensure your customers use strong passwords.

Your customers’ passwords protect their most sensitive information—one password breach could spell financial ruin for a business. Luckily, cloud-based password management offers a quick and easy way to create a strong password inventory. Password management tools are cost-effective and can exponentially decrease your chance of a security breach.

What Are Password Security Best Practices?

With passwords, a little bit of foresight goes a long way. Here are some of the most reliable ways to optimize password security.

  • Use a cloud-based password manager. Strong passwords and multi-factor identification (MFA) are less complicated with a password management tool. Enterprise password management can help your customers maintain password security best practices, even without MSP supervision. Password management offers centralized storage space for all passwords, with one master password as an entry point. This enables your customers to use diverse, strong passwords—without having to separately document each one.
  • Create strong passwords. Unless your customer unintentionally divulges a password through phishing or malware, attackers will need to use brute-force attacks to determine a password. Increased complexity decreases the chances that a brute-force attack will be successful. Strong passwords include long-tail passwords and passwords that don’t include obvious personal information—or even better still, passphrases can help increase account security. Your customers should also understand the need to use a different password for each account, to prevent a stuffing attack. Cloud-based password management can auto-generate strong passwords and verify the strength of your pre-existing ones.
  • Use multi-factor identification (MFA). A traditional password uses one factor of identification—the password itself, which is a code that only the intended user should know. Another factor of identification is something the intended user should have—like a smartphone, which can be confirmed via SMS message. For even more security, a third possible factor of identification is something you are—which can be determined with physical identification technology, like fingerprint detection or facial recognition. A major benefit of a password manager is that it makes it easier to set up MFA.

Benefits of Using a Password Manager

The benefits of a password manager are extensive. Password managers like N‑able® Passportal can help your customers generate, store, and easily access their passwords. One master password enables access to a limitless and easily searchable password deposit. Privileged employees can access the system whenever necessary.

Password managers are designed to make access credentials as secure and as convenient as possible—both for MSPs and their customers. For MSPs, Passportal offers the advantage of easy access to customer passwords from a single, centralized console. Centralization can make supervision quite convenient. It allows for easier security audit reporting, privileged access management, and automated password rotation.

For MSP customers, password management tools like Passportal allow for password management with almost no downtime. Customers can create strong, unique long-tail passwords for each of their logins and can access these passwords in mere seconds. They can also receive notifications when a password needs to be updated and enable MFA. This allows customers to better stay on top of password best practices.

Are Password Managers Safe?

MSPs and customers alike often express concerns about the safety of password managers. With a master password controlling your entire vault, wouldn’t it be easy for attackers to gain access to a massive amount of data with one lucky draw? The simple answer is: no.

As with any security management software, there’s always a very small possibility that a sophisticated cyberattacker could hack your system. But, Passportal takes extensive measures to encrypt its data, so even a system breach will be unable to access password vaults. Encryption means an attacker that hacks into the Passportal cloud would still require each customer’s master password to access individual data. On the chance that a phishing expedition or a malware attack acquires your master password, you can easily rewrite any system passwords from your central control.

Password managers are widely used by MSPs because they are much safer than the alternative—allowing your customers to choose and update their passwords at will. For maximum password security and minimal downtime, cloud-based password management is hard to beat.

© N‑able Solutions ULC and N‑able Technologies Ltd. All rights reserved.

This document is provided for informational purposes only and should not be relied upon as legal advice. N‑able makes no warranty, express or implied, or assumes any legal liability or responsibility for the accuracy, completeness, or usefulness of any information contained herein.

The N-ABLE, N-CENTRAL, and other N‑able trademarks and logos are the exclusive property of N‑able Solutions ULC and N‑able Technologies Ltd. and may be common law marks, are registered, or are pending registration with the U.S. Patent and Trademark Office and with other countries. All other trademarks mentioned herein are used for identification purposes only and are trademarks (and may be registered trademarks) of their respective companies.

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