For thirty years, security advice has converged on more painful passwords: longer, more complex, rotated more often. The result, predictable in hindsight: people write them on sticky notes, reuse them across systems, and forget them just often enough to trigger password-reset flows that themselves become attack surfaces. The dirty secret is that password complexity rules barely matter against modern attacks. Phishing, credential stuffing, and session hijacking don't care whether your password is "correct horse battery staple" or "Tr0ub4dor&3" — they steal it whole.
The actual move worth making in 2026 is the same move Apple, Google, Microsoft, and the rest of the security-serious tech industry has been pushing for the last five years: stop using passwords as the primary credential wherever you can. Passkeys (the WebAuthn standard, available everywhere good) replace passwords with cryptographic keys tied to your device's biometric — Face ID, Touch ID, Windows Hello. There's nothing to type, nothing to phish, nothing to reuse. The login is faster, more secure, and harder to get wrong in ways your users notice.
For the systems where passkeys aren't yet available, the next best move is well-implemented multi-factor authentication — and "well-implemented" means hardware tokens or device-bound authenticator apps, not SMS codes. (SMS-based MFA is better than nothing, but it's been routinely defeated by SIM-swap attacks for years now. Treat it as a stopgap, not a standard.) Combine those with a company-wide password manager so that the passwords you do still have are unique, long, and never have to be remembered by a human, and you've eliminated the entire category of attack that targets weak or reused credentials.
The cultural change is the hardest part. Security teams used to be the people who said "no" and "type your password again." The successful ones now are the people who say "let's get rid of that password entirely." That shift — from harder passwords to fewer passwords — is the biggest single security improvement most small businesses can make this year, and it costs less than the password manager license you're probably already paying for.