In today’s rapidly evolving business landscape, robust access control is paramount, especially when managing digital credentials. This article addresses the critical need for centralizing credential access control as a business grows from startup to enterprise, exploring how effective access control allows organizations to secure their sensitive information and streamline operations.
The Double-Edged Sword of Growth
Establishing clear workplace rules early in the business lifecycle helps employers mold behaviors, ensure best practices and enforce policies consistently as an organization grows. Nowhere is this more critical than in credential creation and management. Poor password hygiene habits can be hard to break, and weak passwords are a primary source of breaches.
Growth brings opportunity and success – that’s why you started your own business – but also complexity, especially regarding security and access management. Even when it’s just you and a trusted partner or two it’s very important to control access security, an efficiency through a password manager.
As your business scales thiese becomes even more critical, the need to manage who can access what, identify password ownership, apply rules for safe password creation and sharing, and confidently revoke access to all resources when someone leaves the company.
The Startup Scramble: When everyone needs access
When everyone is wearing many hats, is a member of every team, and shares responsibilities across multiple business functions, everyone needs access to everything. Keeping plain text password lists and sharing them through emails, Slack, text messages and sticky notes may work initially, but present business risk and plant seeds for future problems.
Without guidelines for password length and strength, oversight of sharing practices or audit trails to determine the source of a breach, startups are leaving themselves open to security risks.
Scaling Pains: When access control breaks down
Congratulations! Your business is taking off. You’ve added employees and vendors – some on-site, some remote. There are new software apps, social media and bank accounts, and licensed cloud services that also come with passwords and bring new security challenges:
- Some clients may require your business meet HIPAA, GDPR, SOX or SOC 2 compliance standards for data privacy, yet provide transparency for audits in the event of breach.
- On-boarding New employees need authentication to access specific resources given their responsibilities, while departing staff need to be completely de-provisioned with 100% certainty to protect the business against disgruntled former employees or cyberattacks through idle yet active identities.
- Ensuring all employees create, manage and share credentials to company standards.
- Tracking new services and passwords added by employees on an ad-hoc basis and keeping current with any changes to those users and permissions.
- Employees advancing within the company may experience “privilege creep,” retaining access to older services and accounts that are no longer needed as their roles change.
- Adding, transferring and deleting software licenses to match fluctuating employee populations to eliminate wasted spend.
Imagine if you or someone in your organization had to perform all these duties manually. For every employee. There wouldn’t be time left for much anything else and no doubt things would slip through the cracks. Fortunately, there is a solution: Role-Based Access Control, or RBAC. Implementing RBAC today can save a lot of headaches tomorrow.
The Solution: Centralization and Role-Based Access Control (RBAC)
As your business progresses through its startup, growth and maturity stages you’ll need a centralized password management solution capable of RBAC that can scale along with it.
Centralized because that implies one person or identity, always has 100% visibility into and administrative control over all password-related activities and users. RBAC because it allows organizations with large populations to efficiently grant uniform access to resources based on role, location or seniority rather than by individual.
Anyone joining the Sales Department, for example, is automatically granted access to CRM and order placement systems, but not to financial accounts. This is known as the Principle of Least Privilege (PoLP), a cybersecurity best practice in which each user is given the minimum level of network clearance to access only the systems needed to perform their job and nothing more.
Benefits of RBAC for scaling businesses and enterprises
Organizing large groups of like users to manage access rights en masse offers a number of benefits to growing midsize and enterprise-class businesses:
- Enhanced security. Fewer authorized users accessing each resource limits the number of network entry points and passwords to reduce the attack surface, while preventing employees from accessing systems beyond their scope mitigates insider threats.
- Operational improvement. Streamline user management tasks by efficiently onboarding/offboarding employees. Tag new user profiles with a title or add them to a group to give access to required resources for their job with a few clicks. Revoke their privileges just as easily and completely.
- Reduced stress for IT staff. RBAC allows IT staff to execute consistent and repeatable changes to user permissions in bulk, saving time, ensuring no one is missed, preventing privilege creep, and keeping helpdesk password reset calls to a minimum.
- Simplified compliance. Access logs, user histories, and comprehensive reporting helps organizations demonstrate compliance with regulatory frameworks by providing a full audit trail of activities related to protected data.
- Greater Scalability and Flexibility. Easily adapt to organizational changes such as mergers and acquisitions by adding new groups or managing access to critical services across entire classes of employees as business needs change.
Passpack for the Enterprise: Secure Credential Sharing and RBAC at Scale
Passpack delivers all these benefits and provides the necessary administrative controls and role-based permissions to manage access securely and efficiently at scale. Passpack…
- is centralized. Your designated Passpack administrator(s) has 100% visibility into all password-related activity and can set enforceable rules and policies around access control such as password strength, reuse and expiration.
- supports RBAC through Teams. Easily organize users into groups by job function and grant or change access to resources for entire Teams as needed. Passpack supports an unlimited number of Teams, and users can be part of multiple Teams. Granular controls allow admins to manage individual user permissions within each Team, such as Read Only for Team members and Read/Write for Team leaders.
- controls sharing. Advanced access controls in the Business Plan such as Allowed Domains and Verified Domains limit external addresses and URLs to trusted partners that can join Teams, connect to the Administrator account, or receive password-related messages through Passpack. Through DNS validation, admins can block users at Coca-Cola from sharing passwords with someone at a Pepsi.com email domain, for example.
- facilitates compliance. A suite of monitoring and reporting tools track IP logins, user activity and password histories for transparency in auditing and compliance purposes, and to identify the source in the event of a breach.
- is scalable. The platform supports an unlimited number of passwords, users and Teams. Plus, Passpack incorporates several tools to meet the secure password sharing and access needs of large enterprises businesses with API integration, single sign-on (SSO), multi-administrator support, as well as multi-factor authentication (MFA) and/or YubiKey token authentication to keep pace with evolving needs driven by growth.
Make the Transition: Implementing Centralized Access Control with Passpack
Where do you go from here? Start by auditing your current access controls. This may take some effort, but the long-term gains will be worth it.
- Confirm who has access to what. Account for every protected resource and every employee and partner.
- Define user roles clearly and granularly (by title, seniority, location, etc.).
- Assign permissions to online resources to each role.
- Using defined role parameters, organize users into discreet groups of Teams requiring access to common resources.
- Implement the Passpack password management application and designate an Administrator(s) to configure the software, load company credentials and create RBAC Teams.
- Train your employees on the use of the Passpack app, on practicing good password hygiene and sharing habits, and to be aware of the latest phishing scams.
Securely Scale Your Access Control with Passpack
The road from startup to enterprise has plenty of challenges. Don’t make password and credential creation and sharing one of them. Decentralized, manual password management methods gives rise to cyber risks in any size of business but will inevitably fail at scale, increasing the risk of data breaches and accompanying compliance fines and bad press.
Passpack delivers scalable centralized password management with the role-based access controls needed for secure, compliant and efficient operations as your business matures. Sometimes, budget constraints play a role in investing in new security technologies. But with plans starting at just $1.50 per user/month, Passpack makes it affordable to put centralized, RBAC-enabled password management in place.
Contact us for a demonstration of Passpack’s enterprise security management features or try the Passpack Business Plan risk-free. Start your FREE 28-day trial today!