By Niresh Swamy, Enterprise Evangelist
When someone asks how you start a typical weekday, your answer likely includes the usual suspects, be it waking up, brewing coffee, or maybe even a quick scroll through the news. In the post-pandemic world where remote work has become commonplace, it also includes logging in to work.
Buried in this mundane act is a timeless truth we often overlook. It’s not glamorous. It’s rarely questioned. But it defines the frontline of enterprise security: It’s the password routine.
For employees though, it is simply a part of the daily grind, an afterthought tucked between calendar invites and coffee refills, driven more by habit than by a conscious understanding.
The subtle art of choosing a password
So this is how it goes, right?
When you join an organization, you are instructed to choose a password. At this juncture, how many of us put security over convenience? Yes, policies demand complex passwords. But most still choose shortcuts; the same password reused and tweaked just enough to meet requirements, likely written down somewhere.
We know password reuse is bad. So, why do we still do it?
Organizations assume it’s a knowledge problem, piling on training and rigid policies. But it’s cognitive biases that drive this behavior.
Bounded rationality
Just enough is good enough.
Managing passwords is mentally exhausting, so we settle for shortcuts like browser autofill or reused passwords. It is not laziness. It's simply an efficient trade-off in our mental cost benefit calculation.
Availability heuristic
If I remember it, it must be right.
We stick with variations of the same password because they’re easiest to recall. We equate memorability with safety, even when that makes us vulnerable.
Loss aversion
I’d rather not lose access than make it more secure.
The fear of being locked out feels more immediate than a cyberattack. Access outweighs long-term protection.
Expecting perfect decisions in imperfect circumstances is futile. If secure behavior feels like a burden, the system wasn’t built with people in mind.
Bridging the gap between the familiar and the secure
To support secure behavior at scale, organizations must take the burden out of employees’ hands. The best way to prevent risky password behavior is to remove the need for passwords altogether.
Passkeys, SSO, and magic links remove friction points. Passkeys replace recall with cryptographic keys. SSO streamlines access across platforms with a single credential. Passkey-enabled vaults eliminate individual management.
These upgrades bypass bounded rationality, availability bias, and loss aversion by eliminating decisions where shortcuts emerge. The choice disappears, therefore so does the risk.
Recognizing the absurdity in enterprise password management
Camus wrote of Sisyphus, condemned to push a boulder uphill only to watch it roll back. Security rituals, passwords, login prompts, drills feel much the same. Fatigue kicks in, habits take over, and workarounds emerge.
The solution is not more complexity, but rethinking the system. Passkeys, SSO, PAM, and AI relieve individuals of absurdity. In doing so, the boulder vanishes, replaced by systems that reflect real human thought and capacity.