How to safeguard passwords at the enterprise level

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Security is a concern for all of us. It's even more important when you are dealing with large corporations and their sensitive data. A company can't afford to have any security breaches, but it's not always easy to protect your enterprise passwords.

You need to make sure that they are complex enough to be difficult to hack, but easy enough for the employees to remember. Here are some tips on how you can keep your enterprise passwords safe.

The consequences of data theft for enterprise companies

The consequences of data theft for enterprise companies are pretty severe. Aside from loss of trust with consumers, your company also risks financial penalties, as well as trouble with regulators.

Corporate espionage is also quite common, and can hurt your business if you do not have appropriate policies in place to minimize or manage the damage. Specifications of proprietary products, trade secrets, and formulas can easily fall into the wrong hands if you don't have the proper protections in place.

Here are the best ways for an enterprise company to safeguard their passwords, without having to be an IT expert.

Use a password vault

The first option for safeguarding your enterprise password is to use a password vault. These are highly secure password management solutions that can be embedded directly into the corporate system.

Enterprise password vault solutions will use the best encryption methods possible to ensure that no one is able to read the passwords stored in the vault. Also, your employees won't be required to create and remember new passwords - they can generate them as needed with the support of the solution.

The passwords generated will be highly complex sequences of letters, numbers, and symbols. These are nearly impossible to crack using brute force methods, and if configured for maximum security, even employees won't ever see the passwords - the vault will automatically supply credentials to login forms, without displaying them in plain sight.

Enforce a principle of least privilege and track employee behaviour

Another way to make sure that your enterprise data is secure is by enforcing a principle of least privilege. This means that users should only have access to the privileges they need to do their job properly. What's surprising is how many companies are good at this with current employees, but terrible at it with contractors or temporary employees.

When an employee resigns or is terminated, it's absolutely crucial to revoke their access privileges. However, while companies may be good at remembering to revoke a terminated employee's access, that same employee could easily slip through the cracks if they stopped showing up for work.

This is why HR software that tracks and monitors employee behavior and attendance is also a good action to take. If an employee misses work for 3 days, it's a good idea to pre-emptively take their access privileges away, just to be safe.

Use multi-factor authentication

Two-factor authentication is a popular security measure that we use in our everyday lives - but an enterprise company should enhance that, and use a more advanced method like multi-factor authentication.

2FA is useful for protecting social media accounts, such as requiring an email token to sign into your Facebook, but this isn't comprehensive enough for enterprise security. With MFA, several authentication factors including tokens, biometrics, or a physical item (such as a USB) are required to log into your corporate account.

Biometrics should be carefully considered for their system design and security, though. For example, some smartphone manufacturers have facial recognition systems that are easily tricked by photographs. Fingerprints and retina patterns are the most difficult to replicate, so combining these with a physical token would be an excellent combination.

Conclusion

These are the main ways that enterprise companies can improve their security in their password management system. While overall system security will be dependent on the capabilities of your IT team, password security is something that doesn't take any security engineering skills and is largely dependent on how employees behave and use the system.

So with that said, having strong measures in place that limit employee usage of the system and the risks that they expose to the organization will go a long way to ensuring your company's and your staff's security.

This article does not necessarily reflect the opinions of the editors or the management of EconoTimes