How to demonstrate compliance with data security regulations

Effective Password Management

In this, our final blog in this series on how passwords help you protect your most important business data, we look at how rock-solid password management can also protect you from legal trouble and ensure compliance with data security regulations.

Keep a close watch on IT system access

These days, most businesses are subject to data protection laws or regulations of one kind or another. Some come with pretty stiff penalties.

To help demonstrate you’re compliant with access control requirements, you should have clear policies and procedures about who gets access to what, what kind of passwords are required, and how often those passwords are updated. If you don’t have a way of automatically tracking and logging password use, it’s tough to enforce those policies or prove that you’ve followed them after an incident.

A password management solution can help by giving you a full view of the passwords and permissions associated with users in your business. You can see which accounts they have access to, exactly when they sign into them, any changes they make to system credentials and other activities.

Everything under control

With a password management solution, you can assign permissions and adjust them as people change jobs within your company and when they leave. You can be sure everyone has access to everything they need to do their jobs, without having access they don’t need, which could introduce security risks.

This kind of window into your password environment means you have a better chance of spotting unusual activity that could mean a breach. If your log shows an employee logged into an account in the middle of the night from a different country, there’s a good chance his or her account has been compromised. Catching that early can help you act quickly to assess any damage and change affected passwords right away.

Proof at your fingertips

Proper password management saves you a massive amount of time and worry if you ever have to produce records to demonstrate you’re compliant with access control requirements of privacy and data security laws or regulations. The required information is readily available so you don’t have to devote hours of staff time to tracking it all down. And you have less of a chance of being found non-compliant because you missed a step or couldn’t find something.

How IT Foundations can help?

We provide a password management solution for customers that is specifically designed for businesses to retain control of the password management process. Personal password management solutions like those commonly included in internet browsers just don’t cut it for business purposes. If you’d like to learn more about how to manage passwords for you and your team, book a demo with us.

Check out our related blog: Strong Security Starts with Strong Passwords