What is a password manager?

The truth about passwords inside an ordinary company is known to everyone and said by nobody: the same password everywhere, variations built around the current year, a spreadsheet on the shared drive helpfully named Passwords, and sticky notes under keyboards. The problem is not laziness but arithmetic — no human being memorises eighty unique strong passwords. A password manager performs that arithmetic on people’s behalf: an encrypted vault that generates long random passwords for each account, fills them in automatically at login on the correct site (a refusal to autofill on a look-alike domain is, incidentally, an excellent phishing detector), synchronises across devices, and asks a person to remember one master password plus a second factor guarding the vault. Business editions such as Bitwarden, 1Password or Keeper add exactly what the fatal spreadsheet never had: shared team vaults so the company social-media password reaches marketing without travelling through chat apps, rights by role, an access log, administered recovery and — underestimated until the first unpleasant departure — instant revocation, where a leaver loses the vault in one click and the exposed passwords are rotated in an orderly sequence. At a few euros per person per month it is the proverbial best ratio in security spending, because it structurally eliminates password reuse, the silent cause behind most compromised accounts.