Credential Management Best Practices for MSPs in 2026
MSPs manage thousands of credentials across client environments. Poor credential hygiene is a breach waiting to happen. Lock down your practices today.
An MSP with 100 clients might manage 10,000 or more credentials: domain admin accounts, local admin passwords, firewall management interfaces, SaaS application admin portals, API keys, database passwords, and more. Every single one of those credentials is a potential entry point for an attacker. And yet, too many MSPs still store passwords in spreadsheets, reuse admin passwords across clients, or share credentials via email and messaging platforms. If your credential management practices haven't been overhauled recently, you're carrying risk that could be catastrophic.
Enterprise Password Management
Deploy an enterprise password management platform designed for MSPs — tools like IT Glue, Hudu, or Keeper have built-in multi-tenant architecture, role-based access controls, and audit logging. Every credential should be stored in the vault, accessible only to technicians who need it for their assigned clients, and subject to automatic rotation where possible. Implement check-out procedures for highly privileged credentials where the technician requests access, the system logs the request, and the credential is automatically rotated after the session ends. Never allow credentials to be stored outside the vault — no sticky notes, no browser password managers, no personal vaults.
Rotation and Monitoring
Rotate all privileged credentials on a defined schedule: quarterly at minimum for admin accounts, immediately when a technician leaves the organization, and instantly when a compromise is suspected. Deploy LAPS for local administrator passwords so that every machine has a unique password that rotates automatically. Monitor for credential exposure by subscribing to breach notification services and regularly checking whether any client domains appear in credential dumps. Conduct quarterly access reviews to ensure that terminated employees have been fully deprovisioned across all client environments and internal systems. The goal is simple: no shared credentials, no stale credentials, no unmonitored credentials.