4 Reasons Your Company Should Stop Using Passwords
If you use passwords every day, you probably reach a point where you stop thinking about them. You simply use them to access your smartphone, check your bank account balance, or access a telehealth portal to see some test results. You might have autofill for your passwords on your personal devices since you assume no one but yourself ever uses them.
That’s fine if you have autofill passwords on your personal laptop or desktop at home. It is probably okay on your smartphone as well. If you have passwords for your business computer, though, and you use them at the office, that might not be such a bright idea.
Some companies are getting away from passwords and using biometric indicators these days because they don’t want their workers using passwords anymore. Instead, they can use iris or fingerprint scans.
In this article, we’ll talk about a few reasons why business entities don’t want to let their employees use passwords in the workplace.
Passwords Cause Many Breaches Every Year
Seemingly, the public hears about a new data breach every year. Bank of America has experienced one before, and Target has as well. Compromised credentials, like passwords, account for many of these problematic breaches. In fact, compromised credentials cause 20% of all breaches, and that’s a statistic that should get every boss and company owner’s attention.
When some companies hear about numbers like that, the CEOs feel like they are ample reason to stop using passwords altogether. Since other options exist now, why should they continue to let password usage put their entity at risk?
Password Reuse is Rampant
Let’s say you’re running a company, and you don’t want to get rid of passwords. Maybe your workers like the password system and don’t mind plugging them in every time they use a particular software suite or a work-related app.
Perhaps you can get away with that for a while, but if a hacker ever targets your company, that system might not go over so well. It is because hackers are very good at guessing simple passwords, and your workers may tend to use identical ones over and over again.
A hacker who wants to access your sensitive documents can use falsified credentials to do it. If they figure out an employee’s password they use for one computer task, the hacker might find success using it for many other software suites and apps. It might surprise you how many workers use a password like “password” in an office environment.
Passwords Are Seldom User-Friendly
Another reason why you may want to move your business away from passwords is that you’re probably aware simple ones are easy for hackers to guess. If you understand this, but you don’t want to implement a passwordless system yet, you might ask your workers to come up with more complex passwords instead. They might use upper and lower-case letters, numbers, and random symbols.
If they do, it makes it less likely a hacker can guess their password, but the employee will not be able to remember it, either. They will have to keep a master password list close at hand, and a bad actor who wants to damage your company could easily find one of these lists.
This demonstrates how the password system is usually fine if you use it in your own home, but not so much in workplace environments.
Passwords Slow Down Your Workers
One final reason to stop using passwords at work is that your employees will have to put one in every time they use a different computer element during their workdays. If they have more complex passwords and they’re not using autofill, they’ll have to find the correct password for each new app or website, and maybe they’re using dozens of them daily. If you told them to come up with complex passwords, filling each new one in will take up some time.
That time adds up as the day goes by. You want your workers to be more productive, and if you continue to use passwords, they won’t finish as many assignments on time.
All this might be enough to convince you to move away from passwords at your company one of these days. It is even possible that passwords at the workplace might become completely obsolete at some juncture.
For now, some companies continue to use them, but they will probably keep running into the same fundamental problems we have mentioned in this article.
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