Credential management in the enterprise

Got your password management under control with company-wide adoption? Congratulations! 

The work isn’t done though. Your workforce applications are diverse and one poorly managed credential could have severe consequences. It’s time for stronger credential management. 

Here’s a familiar stat: 81 percent of hacking-related data breaches succeeded through stolen passwords or weak passwords. Bitwarden customers have a keen understanding that even a cybersecurity stack of SSO, firewalls, email security, and antivirus isn’t complete without encouraging and assigning end-user responsibility. 

An enterprise password manager that’s easily integrated into day-to-day workflows promotes good password habits and minimizes bad ones – insecurely sharing important credentials, and using weak or reused passwords. Want to prevent data breaches and phishing attacks? Start with a password manager. 

Fundamentally, secrets management protects sensitive information from getting into the wrong hands. Not too different from password management. 

But while most people use passwords, developers work in technical environments that include API keys, tokens, developer secrets, and machine-to-machine credentials pulled during different stages of the deployment process, or injected directly into instances or containers as environmental variables. 

Secrets management gives developers and DevOps teams the ability to deploy applications in different environments without hardcoding or keeping them in clear or plain text in the code itself – believe it or not, this was common practice before secrets management solutions came to market. 

Just as you’re empowering end users with password security, give your developers a dedicated solution that automatically handles all their secrets across dynamic infrastructures. 

2023 was the year tech giants such as Apple, Google, and Microsoft announced support for passkeys, essentially fast-tracking this emerging technology to the forefront of cybersecurity. Today, Bitwarden takes a multi-pronged passkey strategy:

• Passkey management. Bitwarden users can centrally store, secure, and manage passkeys within their vaults. 

• Log in with passkeys. Bitwarden users can now log in and decrypt their password manager and secrets manager accounts with a passkey, eliminating the need for a master password. This feature is currently in beta.

• Passkey APIs and developer toolkits. Bitwarden paves the way for developers to deploy both consumer and workforce passkey authentication within minutes. Who wouldn’t love more streamlined passwordless experiences? Before that can happen, developers need to build them – Bitwarden provides the right tools. 
  
  

Setting a secure foundation for your enterprise is paramount to its success. Bitwarden credential management solutions are the smartest investment a business can make in keeping employees productive and critical applications and assets safe. Eliminate the barriers to growth and momentum by thinking more strategically about credential management. 

Evaluate your need for a password manager

• Are all your employees and team members using strong and unique passwords for all their business accounts?

• Are you certain they are not sharing important credentials via email? In spreadsheets? On sticky notes?

• Does your SSO provider cover all your applications? Are you able to manage access control through individual logins? 

Evaluate your need for a secrets manager

• Do you have developers, DevOps, or IT teams managing machine credentials such as API keys, configuration files, database credentials, applications, OAuth tokens, and certificates?

• Are they securing these credentials across environments for developers, including testing, staging, and production?

• Are they securing sensitive production credentials to reduce access to customer data? 

• How are they securing CI/CD applications such as Jenkins, GitHub Actions, Ansible, Kubernetes, Terraform, GitLab, and more? 

Evaluate your need for passwordless workforce authentication

• Are you exploring passkey authentication for your workforce so they can access internal or custom applications without using passwords? How do you currently handle 2FA today? 

• How much time does your team spend on password resets?

• How much do you currently invest in other security tools to prevent data breaches and phishing attacks?

• What does your current access management or SSO setup look like and are you seeking to incorporate passwordless experiences into it? 

While SSO is a common way for businesses to centralize access control for critical applications, many applications do not support SSO, meaning organizations still have to manage access control through individual logins. 

Evaluate your need for SSO and credential management integration

• Are your employees creating strong and unique credentials for the SSO service?

• Do you work with third party agencies or contractors who sit outside SSO?

• Do you have applications that are not connected to SSO?

• Do you have applications that don’t offer SSO?

There are many advantages to SSO, but the only way to ensure all your applications and credentials are secured is to use SSO with Bitwarden credential management solutions. 

Launch a free trial of Bitarden Password Manager, Bitwarden Secrets Manager, and Bitwarden Passwordless.dev. Contact the Bitwarden sales team for additional questions.