Password Management Market to Reach $709.6 Million by 2019

An individual who tries to remember, for instance, 20 simple passwords may be stretching the limits of his memory. His counterpart that tries to remember 20 difficult passwords in the form of hashes, though, is most certainly trying to achieve the impossible.

In the modern digital age, people must remember passwords for their personal and professional lives. They have social and financial accounts, mobile devices, and businesses that demand pieces of their memories, and it can get to a point where those 20 passwords doubles, triples, or worse. This is where password management can come in handy.

Password management software and services can lift the weight off of individuals and businesses by replacing a sea of passwords with one master password. And since such services have become so necessary, it is no wonder that the password management market is expanding at a rapid pace.

MarketsandMarkets, a global market research company, forecasts that it will rise to $709.6 million in 2019 -- up from $311 million this year. That represents and compound annual growth rate of 17.9 percent over five years.

MarketsandMarkets broke down the global password managment market into types, access points, and global sectors in its recent report, "Password Management Market by Type (Self Service Password Reset, Privileged User Password Management) & by Access (Desktop, Mobile Devices, Voice Enabled Password Reset) - Global Advancements, Forecasts & Analysis (2014-2019)."

It reports that the global driver of password management tools is the abundance of regulatory requirements businesses and governments set forth and the number of methods in which users can reset their passwords.

Global organizations, the research points out, are beginning to provide password management in new ways that include automatic encryption and USB tokens. As such, they are segmenting the overall market into self-services password management and privileged password management.

The former segment represents password management that users can perform on their own such as password resets without the need for a help desk. The latter segment includes the help desks and requires the time and expertise of IT services. It is the opinion of the researchers that there is room for growth in both segments and that small to midsize businesses will benefit largely from self-management due to their need for compliance but limited budgets.

Furthermore, the growth of cloud usage can help this market by allowing individuals and businesses ways to access their passwords in a single location from any device without the need for specialized software. Cloud-based startups can take advantage of the market by either offering helpdesk services through a unified cloud solution or by offering password management software as part of a software-as-a-service package.