Ask HN: How does your business manage passwords?

Posted by owenwil on Wednesday July 17, 2013 @10:26PM
from the ask-hn dept.

I'm curious how the startups and small to medium businesses out there manage their passwords. I work for a company that's experiencing massive growth and up until now, Keepass had worked for the Operations team as it was made up of six people. Now there is almost 40 of us, it's unmanagable. We don't know who's doing what and we can't revoke access to the files after someone leaves.

Unfortunately, most 'enterprise' grade software out there is horribly designed, has a terrible UI and is very hard to use. Does anyone have any recommendations for a product? Would be particularly interested to hear if there's any startups in this space looking to help with team password management.

( 6 comments | 7 points | on HN )

Re:Ask HN: How does your business manage passwords? by schrodingersCat on Thursday July 18, 2013 @04:34PM (#6066271)

My question would be: what massive number of third party services could your company possibly be using to require password management for all users? Most companies I've worked for use enterprise versions of services that integrate with central authentication, making multiple logins unnecessary. I could see admins, web devs, and social media types needing a dedicated solution but not all 40 in your company. Keepass isn't perfect but its just as good as most other solutions I've seen. I believe lastpass offers an enterprise product you may want to check out.

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Re:Ask HN: How does your business manage passwords? by philiphodgen on Thursday July 18, 2013 @09:35AM (#6063496)

We face this problem in our business (a law firm). The current solution is 1Password. I don't know how to share a single data file among everyone so the problem is keeping all of the files in sync as passwords change. And then we have employees who use 1Password for personal passwords. This means lots of hand editing.

We would throw money at a solution to this problem. Give us a shared password vault for the enterprise login stuff while letting each person run his/her personal life untouched by the business username/password stuff.

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Re:Ask HN: How does your business manage passwords? by xgibbousx on Wednesday July 17, 2013 @11:11PM (#6061567)

As a single founder startup, I store all my passwords in text files buried in my My Documents folder. No one besides myself uses my computer so I haven't had any issues thus far. Not the safest route but then again it's just me.

I don't have any product recommendations but I do have a question: What exact features are you looking for in a team password management product?

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Re:Ask HN: How does your business manage passwords? by aayala on Wednesday July 17, 2013 @11:48PM (#6061675)

http://www.keepassx.org/

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Re:Ask HN: How does your business manage passwords? by Sealy on Thursday July 18, 2013 @01:20AM (#6061905)

Unfortunately, most 'enterprise' grade software out there is horribly designed, has a terrible UI and is very hard to use

I believe you have just identified a product niche. Quick hackers, lets get on it!

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Re:Ask HN: How does your business manage passwords? by ibizaman on Thursday July 18, 2013 @05:59AM (#6062675)

I believe this is sarcasm :D

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