Can you even imagine the world before there the Internet? It is an incredibly hard memory to conjure up; however, before the Internet launched, passwords played an extremely minimal role within daily operations. But now, in a majority of situations, you can’t go to a website without being blocked by a different site forcing you to enter a password. For users, this brings up two big challenges: first, making sure your password is not easily hackable yet is very easy to remember and second, managing them in a secure, simple way. This is where enterprise password management plays a pivotal role.

A recent article featured in PCWorld spoke about how, in a hacking incident only last year, hackers were able to gain access to hundreds of thousands of user passwords from popular websites including Gizmodo and Lifehacker, only to then reveal them to the public. This prompted the Wall Street Journal to take an in-depth look at those passwords, quickly discovering that the most popular passwords could have been figured out by a 5 year old. These incredibly easy passwords were 123456, password, 12345678, lifehack and qwerty—and no I am not joking.

You think that’s asking for trouble? Well that’s only the beginning, as a 2009 survey completed by security firm Sophos found that one-third of all users have the same password for everything they do online, the article stated. Essentially, this is a hacker’s dream because the second they figure out that one password, they can get any information about you they want. 

This editor and PCWorld agree that it is extremely important to always use a different password for each and every website you browse. And just as crucial, you must use a password that only you would know and not something anyone who has attended kindergarten might be able to guess. 

So what makes up an ultra secure password? Here are a couple of tips.

For those who like to take the bull by the horns, there are do-it-yourself passwords. According to the article, the longer your password, the more secure it is. In most cases, sites will only ask for a minimum of least six characters, but if you can instead make your password consist of 10 or 12 character, you’ll dramatically increase the level of protection.

Additionally important is a mixture of both upper- and lower-case letters, at least one number, and, if possible, a symbol.

If you would rather not deal with coming up with safe password on your own, there are many programs and services that can pick up the slack for you. Enterprise password management solutions including Secret Server powered by Thycotic, will allow you to control access to your valuable passwords in a central, web-based password repository.

According to TMCnet, “A major benefit of this particular enterprise password management offering includes the fact that the software has the ability to support multiple users, thus allowing customers to manage multiple users in different groups. This works great for large scale enterprise password management and each user needs to only remember one username and password.”

The ability to change passwords remotely lets you automatically add AD accounts into Secret Server. According to Thycotic’s website, “Active Directory integration provides synchronization and authentication for Active Directory users. Remote password changing is fully supported on Windows, Active Directory, Microsoft (News - Alert) SQL Server and Unix accounts. “

By implementing enterprise password management software into daily activities, anyone involved in the enterprise can rest assured that all passwords will remain secure, no matter who tries to retrieve them.

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