Password breaches at sites such as Yahoo, Dropbox and LinkedIn in recent weeks may have many MSP customers breathing a sigh of relief if they managed to escape the carnage.

Jessica Davis

August 16, 2012

2 Min Read
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password security

Password breaches at sites such as Yahoo, Dropbox and LinkedIn in recent weeks may have many MSP customers breathing a sigh of relief if they managed to escape the carnage. But are your customers re-evaluating their password security measures in the wake of these events, or are they risking becoming victims of the next breach?  Here’s how one MSP handled the issue.

To address the password challenge, Canadian MSP XCEL Professional Services and owner Colin Knox created his own solution, Passportal, and is offering it to other managed service providers. The solution grew out of a need at XCEL when a key technician left the company and the mid-tier MSP became concerned about protecting the assets of its growing client list. The company was getting close to 50 customers and 500 passwords.

Members of his MSP peer group were facing similar issues, Knox reports. “We called several MSPs in our peer group and asked how they stored client passwords. We quickly found that none of them had a good solution. Most were embarrassed to tell us they still store client passwords in Excel spreadsheets, Word documents, in home-grown access databases or unprotected fields in their CRM systems.”

In response Knox created the new solution and a company around it.

About Passportal

Passportal is a secure, hosted cloud-based solution that lets MSPs manage their portfolio of client passwords.  The service offers four tiers of protection and encryption for passwords and is hosted in SAS70 certified data centers in Canada and the United States. According to the company, the most recent version of the service offers the following features:

  • Ability to set user/tech access for each client

  • Password history and audit of changes and views

  • Employee/tech exit procedures and workflow

  • Comprehensive  dashboard of stats, alerts and passwords requiring attention

  • Active Directory integration with each client network

  • Mobile access on iPhone, iPad, Android and other mobile devices

More than 100 MSPs have already signed up for the service over the past few months and stored thousands of passwords for domain administration, firewall, database, public DNS, spam filters, VOIP and other line of business applications, the company said.

MSP pricing starts at $49 per month.

And you can expect more password management tools from Passportal . The company calls the current offering the first in a family.

 

 

 

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About the Author(s)

Jessica Davis

Jessica Davis

Jessica Davis is the former Content Director for MSPmentor. She spent her career covering the intersection of business and technology.  She's also served as Editor in Chief at Channel Insider and held senior editorial roles at InfoWorld and Electronic News.

See more from Jessica Davis
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