National IT Professionals Day is on the third Tuesday of September every year. This year on September 19
th, we encourage you all to take time to celebrate and recognize the technical experts that ensure our operating systems run smoothly.
In 1975, Business Week first published an article that highlighted the popularity of the personal computer and its burgeoning demand, and by 2000, there was a notable decline in paper usage across offices in America. Fifteen years later in 2015, SolarWinds (a technology infrastructure management company) submitted National IT Professionals Day to the National Day Calendar. It was accepted and a new informal national holiday was created that demonstrates the importance of recognizing technology professionals and their immense value and contribution towards the long-term success of organizations.
Crunchr, a long term LastPass Customer, enables organizations globally to gather meaningful insights into workforce operations. Based in Amsterdam, they help businesses to curate a healthy working environment through equipping leadership with data that can predict trends and mitigate employee churn. Jan Joris Vereijken, Chief Technology Officer at Crunchr is one of the technical experts that we celebrate for their dedication towards keeping computer systems running smoothly within his organization.
Although the impact of IT Professionals cannot be quantified, here are three reasons why IT Professionals are key to the success of your enterprise:
They keep you safe.
IT professionals remain dedicated towards ensuring your experience with computers is secure and safe. As the COVID-19 pandemic accelerated our journey towards cloud-based infrastructures in 2020, they worked tirelessly to educate teams on existing cybersecurity risks, in providing seamless software deployments and bolstering our password hygiene.
At Crunchr, Vereijken recognized the risks associated with poor password hygiene after his personal Twitter account was compromised. Crunchr invested in LastPass to improve staff’s credentials and enforce policies that ensure their passwords are a minimum of 12 characters long and contain letters, numbers, and special characters. By creating unique passwords through the LastPass Password Generator for each application, employees are able to remain vigilant against phishing attacks and mitigate their potential impact.
Vereijken adds: “I’ve learned that it’s vital to have a unique password for each account, it’s become a rule for all employees across the business.”
They streamline your experience.
For regular computer users, the ease of access to varied platforms can go amiss as it becomes a norm of your day-to-day working practice. However, a lot of work goes into integrating systems in order to deliver users with an optimal experience, from embedding single sign-on, activating federated user integration, and replenishing key credentials.
At Crunchr, the team operates with over 60 different cloud-based solutions ranging from Bitbucket, Google Workspace, and Hubspot. They capitalize on LastPass to ensure each staff member has an accessible repository of passwords that they can leverage with ease via their vault or embedded browser extension. Password sharing is used to streamline accessibility across the team in the circumstance that there are limited logins to a platform that various members of a team require access to. Through shared folders, they can also manage accounts and ensure credentials are updated routinely so leaving employees are unable to retain access.
Verejiken highlights: “We had someone leave the finance team recently, the first thing I did was modify the credentials. If the team is following our guidelines and accessing the passwords through shared folders, they wouldn’t even realize that any changes have been made.”
They troubleshoot on your behalf.
A company’s IT professional is the ultimate employee advocate, they’re committed to ensuring the technology deployed across the team delivers ease of use and enables individuals to focus on their respective roles. With each investment they make, from multi-factor authentication providers to password management tools, IT professionals must consider the employee experience and how these solutions will bring value to individual contributors, whilst supporting the wider organization. Accessibility and user-friendliness are key to attaining adoption across an organization and plays an instrumental role in the decision-making process within the IT buyer journey.
When it was time for Crunchr to evaluate a password management solution, Verejiken notes LastPass’s ability to be utilized across multiple devices as a key driver for Crunchr’s investment. The Crunchr team operates in a hybrid format, with 60% of the organization working remotely. They utilize a varied range of tech across the business and wanted a solution that could be accessed on Apple IOS and Microsoft Windows.
Verejiken notes: “The ability to be accessed across varied operating systems was important for me. I wanted to make it an easy deployment for the team and have the password vaults readily available to them at any time, from any location. LastPass remains accessible across multiple platforms without compromising its user experience, which made it perfect for us.”
These are just some of the ways IT professionals enable your organization to thrive, we encourage you all to take a moment to celebrate their impact and give them the recognition they deserve.
Learn more about Crunchr
here.
