Password Managers are great tools for you and your team to save passwords, credentials, notes, and other secure items in a central repository that is easily accessed with a single password, face ID, or touch ID access depending upon the device you use to access the password manager.

1. Sharing Credentials Across Teams or Families

Most Password Managers allow for shared folders, which allow you and your colleagues or family members to share password for common sites in a shared folder. For example, a family might keep all passwords for streaming services in a central folder, which makes it easy for everyone to login to these respective services straight from the password manager. Likewise, in an enterprise setting, a team can use a shared password manager so that passwords that different teammates need access to are shared and updated in a single repository.

2. Leave a Digital Will

Another key benefit of a password manager is a digital will. Again, this applies to both individuals in families and organizations. A digital will in a password manager allows other members to access locked passwords in the event a family member dies or a teammate leaves the organization. This makes it easy for others to access key applications, but only if a significant event triggers the need to provision access. For individuals and families, this is essential for others to be able to access financial accounts and secure notes in the event a loved one passes on.

3. Cross Device Access

Password management tools like LastPass from Cisco work across devices, browsers, and operating systems, meaning all your passwords are stored securely in the cloud and can be accessed from your phone, tablet, laptop or desktop, often using available authentication from those devices such as Face ID or Touch ID. For web browser access, a master password serves as a single point of entry into the vault, then providing access to all other programs. In a web browser, when you land on a website with a username and password, the password manager icon appears and you can select which user credentials you wish to use to login to a particular website.

4. Extended Security Benefits

LastPass offers additional security features, such as two factor authentication, and dark web monitoring, to ensure secure access to your passwords, while keeping malicious agents away. Dark Web monitoring allows you to see if your login credentials have been compromised on the dark web, indicating your account credentials may have been shared with malicious actors. Last Pass also offers password strength tools to let you know the strength of your passwords, but more importantly, looks across all your passwords to let you know if any are duplicated, a common cause of security breaches for users.

5. You Only Need to Remember One Password Again

Of course, the biggest benefit is the most obvious.. password managers require that you only remember one password, a master password that logs you into the vault, from which you no longer need to remember any other passwords. Plenty of people have extremely unsecure password security practices, such as leaving notes on a desk or in their phone, that are susceptible to hackers and other malicious actors. With a password manager, all passwords are stored in one place, hosted in the cloud securely by companies that monitor constantly for threats, given the sensitive nature of the data they harbor.

Password managers are extremely useful, and more users should look to embrace the functions and features they allow to streamline logging into applications or storing secure notes in a place where its easy to access but hard for intruders to find.