Every IT department knows the struggle of educating employees about cybersecurity and ensuring they are maintaining best practices. Creating a password policy can help improve your company’s security posture, but when you have many other competing priorities, rolling out the policy effectively often creates hurdles.
That’s why we’ve done some of the legwork for you. As a password management company, we know a thing or two about creating a password policy that makes sense and employees will follow. Use this guide to help you get started.
Découvrez nos forfaits pour gestionnaires de mots de passe pour particulier ou commencez avec un essai gratuit pour les entreprises.
Check out Dashlane’s business plans or get started with a free business trial.
A password policy is a set of best practices and rules related to password use for your business accounts. Companies establish a policy for employees with the ultimate goal of improving cybersecurity.
Typically, the IT department is responsible for creating a password policy, but the success of this tool relies on all your employees. Policy awareness and education are often part of onboarding and regular cybersecurity training. Including conversations about your password policy in your security awareness program is an effective way of keeping best practices top of mind for employees.
A password policy empowers your employees to proactively improve their security habits by following the practices that keep your organization secure.
Your password policy helps you achieve three main objectives:
Establish a culture of security: A strong security culture helps employees understand why cybersecurity is important to your business goals and how their actions, such as poor password hygiene, impact the organization.
Reduce the chances of a breach or hack: By incorporating best practices such as strong password enforcement into your policy, you are greatly improving your company’s ability to defend against cyber attackers.
Balance security with employee needs: Building a human-centric culture—which approaches security with empathy and caring for employee needs—is essential to getting employee buy-in for your security practices. A password policy helps achieve this by balancing the need to protect the organization with the need to maximize productivity and convenience for employees.
A recent Dashlane survey found that employees whose companies require an enterprise password manager are more likely to describe their organization as secure. If your organization uses Dashlane and wants to create a password policy, here are some suggestions of what to include:
Pro tip: Download our Password Policy Checklist to ensure your organization’s policy covers every important item.
Successful adoption of your password policy relies on factors such as good employee communication and training. Follow these suggested steps:
Effective enterprise password management starts with an effective password policy. Use your policy as a tool for boosting both your security posture and your human-centric security culture.
Visit our Help Center to learn more about getting started with Dashlane and read the Buena Vista University case study to discover how the university onboarded Dashlane across 29+ departments seamlessly.