Jan 29, 2014 // Andrew Stroup
Are your employees protecting the “keys” (read passwords) to your company or putting them at risk? Well if you’re hiring 20-somethings, they aren’t or at least not as well as their Baby Boomer counterparts.
In a recent study by Softchoice, 1,000 full-time employees across the US and Canada were surveyed regarding SaaS applications and their habits that impact security breaches and data loss. Here’s some quick stats the study found about SaaS app users:
1) Employees are over 2x more likely to display their passwords on post-it notes
2) Employees are 10x more likely to store passwords on unprotected or shared drives
3) Employees using SaaS apps for work were 3x more likely to keep passwords in an unprotected document
The study further found that age has a factor on security, where 28.5% of 20-somethings kept their passwords in plain sight, compared to only 10.8% of Baby Boomers. To make matters worse, 36% of employees using SaaS apps access five or more different apps on the job, resulting in too many unique (or very similar) log-ins for them to memorize or maintain securely.
This problem can be addressed with various solutions based on your company and work environment dynamics. Recommended solutions by Softchoice are issuing company-wide password security protocols or single sign-on (SSO)/cloud-based SSO tied to your existing identity management solution.
But what do you do if you’re a small or medium-sized business, have a significant number of SaaS apps your team use, and don’t have an existing identity management solution? We understand most SMBs don’t have a budget for an enterprise-level solution, which is why we built CommonKey to enhance our company-wide security protocols and increase security for our team, protecting us against outside intruders. link.
