Enterprise Password Management is a password security method that goes beyond simply storing your company’s passwords in a secure password vault. Password management software built for the enterprise gives you visibility and control to lower your privileged account risk.  

Managing human and non-human privileged accounts is critical, yet tedious for enterprise IT and security teams. But without a centralized password management system, you have no visibility or control to protect privileged accounts from attack.

What does enterprise password management software do?

Enterprise password management software essentially closes the number-one hole in your attack surface and protects your passwords without slowing down your business by inconveniencing your users.

Strong passwords are an important security practice. But they aren’t enough to prevent a data breach.

Alarmingly, 20% of companies fail to change default passwords, such as “admin” and “12345.”

Hackers use password-cracking techniques, brute-force attacks, and social engineering trickery to steal enterprise passwords. If they get their hands on a password that uses an authentication token (password hash), they can “pass-the-hash” to breach multiple systems without requiring multiple passwords.

Password management software for the enterprise uses security controls to prevent internal and external threats from capturing master passwords, credentials, secrets, tokens, and keys to gain access to confidential systems and data. It can be deployed on-premise or in the cloud. Most important is that it provides password security for all types of privileged accounts throughout your enterprise.

Try our Free Privileged Password Management Tool for IT Teams—it’s a great entry-level segue from a personal password manager to a full-featured enterprise solution.

Automation makes enterprise password management possible

You can’t simply manage enterprise passwords manually and expect to have visibility and control or keep pace with changes in your organization. Consumer password protection tools don’t have the right capabilities and can’t scale to support an enterprise. Old-school enterprise password management software is complex, expensive to manage, and slows down your systems. The more complex the software, the higher the risk of failure.

Are enterprise password solutions the same as password managers?

Not at all. Enterprise password management solutions are much more than a password manager or vault. To keep your corporate passwords safe, you can’t just store them in a protected password vault and hide the key. You also need to manage role-based access provided by those passwords and keep that access up to date. Enterprise solutions provide that capability.

As people leave the organization and projects change, enterprise password management software allows you to change or remove passwords in real time. This is particularly important for shared accounts and systems that must be kept highly secure. To mitigate the risk of a data breach, enterprise-level password management solutions monitor password activity and rotate passwords regularly and automatically.

Password management best practices like password creation, rotation, monitoring, and removal must happen with no disruption to people’s work and no downtime for your systems. An enterprise password management solution designed to keep people productive eliminates the temptation to share passwords and skirt security controls.