Tools
Password managers for IT teams: what changes above 50 people
The consumer products work fine until you need provisioning, shared vaults with real boundaries, and an answer for what happens when someone leaves.
Microsoft
The problem changes shape as you grow
Below about fifty people a password manager is a personal productivity tool that the company happens to pay for. Above it, three things break at once: nobody can tell you who has access to what, offboarding depends on somebody remembering, and the shared vault has quietly become one vault that everybody is in.
Those are provisioning and governance problems rather than encryption problems. Every serious product in this category encrypts adequately. That is not where they differ.
What to actually evaluate
SCIM provisioning from Entra ID
Accounts created and removed by group membership rather than by hand. Without this, offboarding is a checklist item that will eventually be missed.
Vault boundaries that map to teams
Whether you can give the service desk the credentials they need without giving them the finance credentials. One shared vault is not access control.
Secrets for automation
Whether scripts and pipelines can retrieve credentials without a human pasting them. If not, credentials end up in the pipeline configuration anyway.
Recovery when someone leaves suddenly
What happens to a departed employee's vault. Test this before you buy, because the answer is occasionally that the data is unrecoverable by design.
Where a dedicated product fits
Business password management with SCIM and secrets handling
- Best for
- Teams past the point where a shared vault works, who need provisioning tied to Entra ID groups
- Watch out for
- Priced per seat with add-ons. Price the secrets management module separately if you need it, it is not always included
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The verdict
A business tier with SCIM provisioning, once you are past 50 people
The value is provisioning and vault boundaries, not encryption. Buying a consumer tier for a team recreates the offboarding problem you were trying to solve.
Skip this entirely for credentials that should not exist. Anything that can move to single sign-on with Entra ID should, and the best password manager is one holding fewer passwords.
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