You’re probably familiar with some of the basics of good password security, but let’s take a look at the, because they reveal a significant issue with passwords on the whole.
- Passwords should incorporate uppercase and lowercase letters, symbols, and numbers.
- Passwords should never be dictionary words.
- Passwords should be changed at regular intervals.
- The same password should never be used for two different resources.
This all sounds well and good, until one takes into account the fact that people have a very hard time remembering all those passwords. This can create significant headaches, as individuals have to recover their passwords or reset them and, in businesses that have more developed IT resources, administrators have to go through the hassle of resetting passwords for users.
Password management software is a way to keep passwords organized in a secure way. Here are a couple of the better programs out there for meeting this need.
RoboForm
RoboForm has been around since the late 1990s. The program allows users to save usernames and passwords to a variety of different sites and resources and to use a master password to keep them all locked down. The passwords are stored much in the same way that web browser bookmarks are stored.
If you forget credentials, you can go into RoboForm and retrieve them, eliminating the time consuming reset process altogether. There’s another benefit to this software. You can use it to generate strong passwords, which is a much safer way of coming up with new ones than is generating them yourself. Try as hard as you want to avoid doing so, but you will follow patterns when making passwords and a good hacker can sometimes figure them out.
Sticky Password
Sticky Password is a bit simpler than RoboForm, but just as useful. It fills in passwords for you when you visit webpages and other resources for which you’ve had a password memorized by the program. This makes it very easy to get into any of the resources you use on a regular basis.
This is a great way to reduce tedious, repetitive password entry into a one-click process. It’s an excellent tool, very secure, and entirely suitable for use by small and medium sized businesses, entrepreneurs, and freelancers and even by people who just want to make their lives easier by eliminating a login here and there.
What to Keep in Mind
These tools can go a long way toward making life more convenient, but you have to use them correctly. Your master password on RoboForm, for instance, should be very secure. Fortunately, the program can generate such a password for you, so it solves that problem itself.
You should also remember that, when you have passwords stored in a password manager, you should back up that file. This ensures that, if something happens with your machine, you don’t have to spend hours recreating logins and passwords for sites.
Both of these aforementioned solutions work on mobile devices, so you can rely on them on your smartphone, tablet, or other device just as you can on your desktop computer. Be sure to check the licensing requirements with any software of this type so that you know whether you need a separate license for each device or whether one will suffice for all your devices.
Get Ratings
Check the Cloudswave Score on Cloudswave before investing in one of these password managers. The score and reviews will give you more insight than the summaries of the software, in some cases, and can guide you toward a decision that you’ll be truly happy with and software that will perform exactly as you need it to.