We find it astonishing that so many of our clients and associates are still playing the game of remembering all their passwords in their head. On the one hand, with today's technology there's most likely very little chance anyone's going to hack your brain (we think), on the other hand our brains usually have a hard time remembering 12 digits character combinations made up of letters, numbers and odd characters. The result of this is that most people pick a rather easy to remember password for everything they use.

Ten years ago that may have been a practice that was OK on some level, since our lives didn't really resolve around passwords stored on computers, we used keys for everything. Since literally everything we interface with nowadays is going digital or already is, the importance of having a password manager could never have been stronger. Here are some reasons why:

1. Ability to create strong passwords
   As mentioned above, most people use passwords that they can easily remember. The downside of this is that the passwords are usually dictionary type words, which are extremely easy to penetrate by software that's freely available on the internet today. Most password managers have a password generator included, giving users the ability to generate strings that are substantially more secure.
   
2. The end of having to remember passwords
   There are two types of scenarios we've found. The first group of people uses an easy to remember password and uses it for everything. The other group of people goes a step further and uses different passwords for different accounts and websites, but can't remember them efficiently. The result being that every time they have to use their unique password they aren't sure, so they have to use the password recovery, find the piece of paper it was written on or some other rather inefficient process.
   
3. Save time by ease of use
   A good password manager will integrate into your browser, and it will prompt you to save login credentials, and upon revisiting of the site it will offer to fill in the values for you. The result of this is that you just stop spending time on passwords overall. Once you have your set of most commonly used passwords in place, all you're doing is clicking a button here and there to have it pull your information.
   

Depending on which operating system, there are different options available. Mac users are strongly advised to use 1Password - one of the best  password managers on the market in our opinion. It's secure, offers many good options and beyond that is setup to work with syncing services such as dropbox. If you're on Windows than the two most recommended pieces of software are RoboForm and KeePass. Where the first choice requires a license fee to be paid, the second does not. Here are the different managers and where you can get them to try them out.

1Password (Mac OSX)

Website: http://agilewebsolutions.com/products/1Password Download: http://agilewebsolutions.com/downloads

RoboForm (Windows)

Website: http://www.roboform.com/
Download: http://www.roboform.com/download.html

KeePass (Windows)

Website: http://keepass.info
Download: http://keepass.info/download.html