When you’re ensuring thorough organizational security, company-wide settings can be a tricky business. You need them to be strict enough that all employees must comply with the rules, but you also need just enough flexibility to ensure everyone accesses sensitive information on a need-to-know basis.

To help organizations manage their internal security with more flexibility, NordPass offers granular policy controls—an addition to company-wide settings that lets companies assign more precise access controls to employees based on their needs and responsibilities.

What are granular policy controls and why are they necessary?

Organizations often face the challenge of determining the appropriate security measures across teams and individual employees. While globally applied policies can seem like the optimal option, in reality, they may grant overextended access to employees who should otherwise be restricted from accessing certain rights or advanced tools. This lack of access restrictions on a privilege level can lead to mismanagement and open up the organization to security risks.

NordPass tackles this issue, allowing businesses to control their security practices and access management as they see fit. With this functionality, organizations can set specific security policies at the organizational, role, or individual user level. This ensures that all employees can work efficiently based on their duties, setting a higher security standard in the organization.

How do granular policy controls work?

Granular policy controls are available with the NordPass Business, Teams, and Enterprise plans. The granular adjustments are managed by organization Admins and Owners using the Admin Panel based on member scope and particular policies.

Granularity scope

Before the introduction of granularity, all policies in NordPass were set globally, meaning that all organization members received the same access privileges without exception. With granular controls, Admins and Owners can set more precise access rights for members based on three criteria: whole organization, roles, or individual users.

Policy scope

The scope also is flexible across different policies. For instance, if only your Legal and Sales teams need access to the Guest Sharing policy, you limit it so that only select employees or teams with the appropriate role can access it. You can also flexibly adjust the requirements individually; for instance, employees in more sensitive roles may be required to adhere to a stricter password policy than staff in other roles.

The NordPass granular policy controls apply to the following company-wide settings:

• Password Policy: you can customize and enforce password rules for the organization or different roles.

• Guest Sharing: you can allow or disallow the ability to share sensitive information with contacts outside the organization.

• Exporting: you can allow or disallow members of the organization to export sensitive data.

• Autolock: you can define different inactivity periods before NordPass is automatically locked for different roles and individuals.

• Browser extension lock: you can control browser extension behavior and set whether it can remain unlocked based on the role or individual member needs.

• Multi-factor authentication (MFA): you can enforce MFA to ensure a higher security level for the organization, specific roles, or selected employees.

• Email Masking: you can allow or disallow the organization, select roles, or individual members to use decoy email domains to protect their work email accounts.

The benefits of granular policy controls

NordPass’ granular policy controls solve a massive issue for business security: companies are no longer forced to apply global policies. Each team can adapt to higher security standards as role-specific rules reduce the likelihood of miscommunication and accidental or malicious access to sensitive materials.

Organizations that handle sensitive information can impose stricter and more accurate data management practices. With granularity ranging from the individual to the full organization, it offers an easier way to delegate security-related roles and responsibilities, such as sharing data with external partners.

Establishing granular access controls can help companies embarking on compliance journeys to meet the necessary regulatory criteria. Administrators can easily decide which settings must have more restrictive access and which can be more lax. This can protect organizations from unnecessary internal risks or human error and ensure a smoother workflow across teams.

Granular policy controls can also take device security into account. For instance, customizing autolock time requirements allows the organization to provide safeguards for all accounts while simultaneously keeping the workflow uninterrupted for those employees who are not exposed to critical access and can have a longer autolock period. MFA helps provide safer access to sensitive data, especially for employees who may be working remotely or traveling to industry events.

Granular policy controls allow organizations to build a more comprehensive data security system and maintain a clear and flexible cybersecurity standard that takes employee productivity and designated roles into account.

Secure your business with NordPass

Granular policy controls join the long list of NordPass functions that help achieve a higher level of cybersecurity in your organization—here, by enhancing company-wide settings with more precise access controls. With NordPass, you can store sensitive company data in XChaCha20-encrypted storage and share it with colleagues without compromising it. NordPass helps you stay ahead of data breaches with features like the Data Breach Scanner and Password Health, alerting you if your domains or email addresses appear on the dark web and checking your saved credentials for compromised, outdated, reused, or weak passwords.

Put your organization’s cybersecurity first without putting your team’s productivity on the back burner. Find the right NordPass plan for your business and enhance your credential security today.