A CFO explains why every business needs 1Password

From the Verizon Data Breach Investigations Report (DBIR), we know that stolen login credentials are the most common pathway for breaches. This is especially true in our remote-first, hybrid working world where employees bring their own devices and sometimes use unauthorized software and online services. As a result, the potential impact of Shadow IT increases.

To quote Alex Stamos, former Chief Security Officer at Facebook:

“The number one reason people’s privacy is violated massively is that they reuse passwords everywhere. You do not want to have a contagion effect where somebody [reuses a stolen credential] to take over your email and take bank account(s)" - Collision, 2021

75% of data breaches begin from compromised login credentials, and while 1Password is the first step to closing the most consequential security gap, I’m not a security practitioner. We have experts like Pedro Canahuati, our CTO, and Daed Latrope, our VP of Security, for that.

I love that 1Password makes my team secure. But even better is that it also accelerates productivity.

I evaluate 1Password against four jobs:

• Resetting passwords
• Privileged Access and Collaboration
• Lowering the SSO Tax
• Auditing Application Use

Password resets

A CFO at a Fortune 100 company told me that they calculate they spend over $350,000 a year on password resets solely driven by call volume, not even accounting for productivity loss. The Forrester Total Economic Impact report estimates a 70% reduction in help desk tickets representing over $1 million in productivity benefits for companies who use 1Password.

How? 1Password automatically creates strong, random passwords for every application, reducing the need to mandate password rotations. This means fewer frustrating moments getting locked out right before an investor call or waiting for the help desk to reset your password every six months. The payback period for this time drain by itself is under six months.

Privileged access and collaboration

I can’t think of accounts more important to secure than corporate bank accounts, yet there’s no situation in which you can put SSO in front of a commercial bank account. We also need to secure all the shared applications and even files shared with our accounting firms, banks and board audit committees.

Every day, my team relies on 1Password to securely access the most privileged logins in the whole company, and we even use secure storage to share private spreadsheets and documents with vendors and customers. During every fundraising round, we operated our data room from 1Password, which really opened our eyes to the value of our product.

The best thing is that we’re able to temporarily and securely share secrets and files even if the recipient is not a 1Password user.

Lowering the SSO tax

One of the more frustrating developments over the last decade has been the SSO Tax - vendors charging for basic security controls behind a price hike. What we’ve found is a typically 3-year cycle of application deployment where a small subset of a team utilizes a tool, then rolls it out department-wide, and sometimes the application graduates to organization-wide deployment. In this environment, we’re looking for raw returns on every tool we bring onboard.

With 1Password, we’re able to secure those applications whether they’re used by six folks - like the corporate bank account - or hundreds of folks, with strong passwords, avoiding the SSO tax or waiting until organization-wide deployment to justify security investment.

Audit IT access

One of the most difficult requests I make to every team at the end of year is who is using what software. As mentioned earlier under the SSO use case, increasingly more and more software comes in via shadow IT and small sub-teams, which are not under a centrally managed system. That can make us feel like we’re lacking visibility into certain app usage. 1Password’s ability to store logins of any type - password-based or federated - allows us to easily work with department heads to audit software usage and inform budget allocation.

Conclusion

For me, 1Password is way more than a security tool. It’s the indispensable tool for the finance team, handling the most sensitive information and accounts at the company. It’s more than a password manager, it’s a productivity accelerant for our day-to-day work, and I don’t know how we’d have been able to scale 10x in revenue, customers, and size without it.

We also want your employees to be as secure at home as they are at work, which is why every business license of 1Password comes with a complimentary family license for each employee.

Jeannie De Guzman

CFO