Password management in new era means access management, single sign-on

The world may be moving past the need for passwords—slowly—but that doesn’t mean that the old ways are disappearing in a flash.

At password and identity management company 1Password, that means focusing on both the past and the future. Co-CEO Jeff Shiner told IT Brew at last month’s RSAC conference that the ramifications of the Covid-19 pandemic’s effect on identity access management (IAM) can’t be understated; when it comes to bring-your-own-device, for example, there are costs that align with the productivity benefits.

“They are being required to give us those options if they want to continue to grow, and that is of paramount importance to them, and now what they also are recognizing is in order to do that, in order to give that flexibility to their employees, they need to give their employees some simple ways and simple tools that allow them to do so in a secure way,” Shiner said.

The sequel. Extended access management, 1Password’s answer to the need for a more robust and flexible identity suite, has entered “part two” of its development, the company’s VP of Product Jason Meller told us. Single sign-on (SSO) solutions are the key to the future, Meller said, and that’s the challenge.

“We want to be on the device, and we want to be able to meet the auth challenge for where it actually is occurring,” Meller said, “whether that’s in your browser, whether that’s in your terminal, whether that’s going to be with agentic AI.”

Diverse practitioners. 1Password wasn’t the only company in the space making a play for IAM solutions at RSAC. LastPass, a competitor, debuted its Secure Access Experiences program, which utilizes SSOs and access control to manage identity with SaaS monitoring. It’s a situation where, as LastPass CEO Karim Toubba told CyberSaint chief product officer Matt Alderman during a panel at RSAC, there’s a growing desire for easier SSO management than simply password storage.

“The rapid rate of ascension and adoption is increasing, and what used to be applications that are used by IT now we notice—and by the way, we’re at almost a thousand employees, we see it within our organization—almost every organization has this pent up demand for these applications,” Toubba said.