Charlotte Gibb remembers the panic that set in when she realized that the death of an employee could also inflict severe damage on her business.
The employee was the operations manager at AutoClerk Inc., a developer of property management software for the hospitality industry where Gibb is executive vice president. “It was shocking. He told us about his lung cancer on Monday and died on Saturday,” Gibb remembers.
The event was a tragedy for the small, closely knit company, but there were business consequences as well. The employee also took with him the password to his Keeper account, where he stored a variety of secure information and logins to services containing company-critical data. “We never had a secure transition plan because we never talked about it,” Gibb said.
If Keeper’s Emergency Access feature had been available at the time, they wouldn’t have needed one. Announced last week, the feature gives up to five trusted family members or friends access to a Keeper user’s secure vault in case of an emergency or tragic event.
Anyone with a Keeper password manager account can use the new feature to add or remove people from Emergency Access, as well as to change the waiting period for access to the vault. The process ensures the highest level of security because, in the spirit of Keeper’s “zero-knowledge” approach to customer security, encryption keys are never shared with Keeper Security or anyone else.
Zero-knowledge is what sent Charlotte Gibb scrambling when her operations manager passed away. She called Keeper tech support but they could offer no help because they were unable to decrypt the operations manager’s passwords. Gibb was fortunate to have access to the man’s email account, which she used to generate a password reset. However, Keeper’s multi-layer security procedures require several security questions to be answered to complete that process. Gibb was eventually able to figure out the answers by calling the man’s partner, but it’s a call she would have rather avoided.
No one likes to think about emergencies or untimely passing, but tragedy rarely strikes when convenient. With Emergency Access, Keeper users can now make their own backup plans without awkwardness or complex procedures. Think of it as accident insurance for your critical data.