The Bottleneck
How often does your workflow come to a halt because a key collaborator does not have a password to log into one of your essential systems? If you work with an assistant, you’ve probably run into this a lot. It may be an office-wide password, or it may be a password into a travel or credit card site through which the assistant would gain unrestricted access to sensitive personal information.
Much has been written about the need for good password hygiene in light of the near monthly hacks into sites like LinkedIn, which recently had up to 6.5 million passwords stolen.
But what about being able to collaborate efficiently among your team? The ideal solution needs to address the competing demands of security and ease of collaboration.
Our Recommendation
Among the solutions we’ve evaluated, we like LastPass the best. It is a cloud-based, browser-integrated application that manages login details for all of your websites. With LastPass, you can authorize anyone to access your sites without ever actually giving them the individual passwords.
LastPass provides complete control over your passwords, by allowing you to:
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Share only an encrypted version of the password: No password can be seen by a third party in transit. LastPass encrypts your passwords locally, on your own computer, so that you never send the actual password out to the LastPass servers, only the encryption.
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Revoke access at any time: Since you don’t share your actual passwords, you can always revoke the access privileges granted via LastPass.
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Easily generate a unique password for each site: LastPass will offer to do this for each new site. This prevents hackers from gaining the keys to many of your systems if they gain access to an individual site.
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Set custom security levels for each site: With LastPass you control the security on each site. You can allow LastPass to auto-login or require a re-entry of your master password.
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Manage other secure information: LastPass also allows you to store bank account numbers and credit cards. However, it should be noted that this information cannot be shared anonymously within the application.
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Remember only one password: LastPass manages all of your passwords and allows you to remember just one — the master that you use to access LastPass.
LastPass keeps your passwords safe. To get started sharing access with your assistant, friends, or family—or just to alleviate the stress of having to retain multiple login passwords—you can download the LastPass browser extension for free on the LastPass website.