After interviewing Stan Dimitrov, Co-Founder of Drive Password, Aviva Zacks of Safety Detectives started to feel better about the future of password management.
Safety Detectives: What motivated you and your co-founders to start Drive Password?
Stan Dimitrov: To be honest with you, we did it out of our own necessity. We wanted an easy-to-use, collaborative password manager—one that will give us full control over our data. And as we are fully into the Google workspace ecosystem previously known as G Suite, we thought that Google Drive would be the perfect place that we can use as a shared repository for our passwords. This is because all of our companies’ data is in Google’s ecosystem. We thought it would be much more convenient for us to have both our sensitive and non-sensitive data in one place. Of course, the sensitive data had to be encrypted before storing it into Google Drive and this is where Drive Password comes in. We started out of necessity; that’s it, nothing fancy.
Safety Detectives: What is your company’s flagship product?
Stan Dimitrov: The product is Drive Password, which is a very niche password manager specifically built for teams and organizations that are using Google Workspace (formerly G Suite).
Safety Detectives: What makes Drive Password unique when there are so many different password management solutions available?
Stan Dimitrov: First, all the company’s data is stored within Google Drive. Nothing ever touches our servers, which is one of the biggest benefits and one of the reasons why we started Drive Password for ourselves, and then we found that there are companies looking for the same solution.
Second is the very easy way to collaborate with your team. The design of Drive Password is identical to the Google Drive so it’s really easy to share and to collaborate, and—this is probably the most important thing these days—you can easily onboard a new person to the team and they can start using the password manager right away without any additional training. Most people know how Google Drive works, so Drive Password is just your Google Drive for passwords. This is what makes it unique, and we really focus on a specific niche. We are not trying to serve a wide audience.
Safety Detectives: What do you think are the worse cyberthreats out there today?
Stan Dimitrov: I think the people. We’ve seen in the news lately that none of the major breaches are caused by genius hackers. Most of the time, people are not following basic security principles. As people are the worst threat, this is what we are trying to address with Drive Password. In order to address this threat, you need to have available tools for your team and the people inside the organization. You also have to make it really easy to follow all the fundamental security principles. Even the strongest password manager and security system will not help if people aren’t using them.
Safety Detectives: How do you think the pandemic is changing cybersecurity for the future?
Stan Dimitrov: I think that it is making the threat that we just discussed even bigger because the pandemic has accelerated the digitalization of the business process as people have begun working from home. In the past, people would rarely share a password with others, but nowadays, we see that people are sharing passwords in Slack and in Skype. This is a huge mistake, and it needs to be addressed right away before anything else. It’s addressable and it can be solved—not quickly because you need to train people and give them the right tools—but it is something that we try to address with solutions like Drive Password.