So, here’s what you need to know about password policies: they are one of many security tools to protect your company’s data. When putting together a security plan for your company, you should always consider adding a password policy for all of your staff to use for business accounts.
What Are Password Policies?
Password policies are essentially just a list of rules and regulations regarding the passwords you and your employees create and maintain for all of your business accounts and data. Password policies, like passwords themselves, can be unique for each business they are for, although there are some usual elements:
- Minimum password character length: At Solution Builders, we recommend clients have a minimum character length of 12. This helps heighten the complexity of the password or passphrase, making it harder to crack.
- Complexity enforced: Adding both capital and lowercase letters, special characters, and numbers all help make a password more complex and thus harder for a computer to sift through and crack.
- Password age: Many hackers use computerized systems that sift through multiple password possibilities. The more passwords they have to sift through, the harder it is for them to break in. So, when you change your passwords on a regular basis, it’s more likely that your data will be kept safe, since the computer will not have had time to sift through all of your old password possibilities before you have a brand new one.
- Password remembered: You set a number of passwords for it to remember (say four) and it won’t allow you to reuse any of your last four passwords. The more variety that a hacker will have to sift through, the harder it will be for them to find your correct, current password.
Password policies are among the simplest tools for keeping your business data safe. If you still have questions about password policies or any other forms of data protection and security, check out our Security Solutions.
By Taylor J. Bye, Customer Engagement Specialist
