These days, most businesses are subject to data protection laws or regulations of one kind or another. Some come with stiff penalties.
To help demonstrate that you’re compliant with access control requirements, you should have clear policies and procedures about who gets access to what, what kind of passwords are required, and how often those passwords are updated. If you don’t have a way of automatically tracking and logging password use, it’s very hard to enforce those policies — or to show you’ve followed them after an incident.
A password management solution can help by giving you a full view of the passwords and permissions associated with users in your business. You can see which accounts they can access, exactly when they sign into them, any changes they make to system credentials, and other activities.
Everything under control
With a password management solution, you can assign and adjust permissions as people change jobs within your company — and when they leave. You can be sure everyone has access to everything they need to do their jobs without having access they don’t need, which could introduce security risks.
This window into your password environment gives you a better chance of spotting unusual activity that could mean a breach. If your log shows an employee logged into an account in the middle of the night from a different country, there’s a good chance his or her account has been compromised. Catching that early can help you act quickly to assess any damage and change affected passwords right away.
Proof at your fingertips
Proper password management saves you a lot of time and worries if you ever have to produce records to demonstrate that you’re compliant with access control requirements of privacy and data security laws or regulations. The required information is readily available, so you don’t have to devote hours of staff time to tracking it all down. And you have less chance of being found non-compliant because you missed a step or couldn’t find something.
