We recently chatted with Ben Docksteader at Influitive, an advocacy marketing company with offices in the United States and Canada. Our own customer advocacy team talked to Influitive about using their services and they mentioned how much they love using LastPass in their offices. Turns out they’ve been using it in their 150 employee company since 2013. From there, we had a great conversation with Ben, Manager of Engineering Operations, about how LastPass makes shared access seamless (and secure), and even makes security seem easy and fun for employees.
What led Influitive to start using LastPass?
Today, there is no company that can take security lightly. Endpoint protection and password controls for sensitive accounts are part of our Security Policy at Influitive. We show these controls to many customers who demand we have them in place to pass security reviews. They are also required as part of greater privacy legislation like GDPR and PIPEDA that require implementing practices like the principle of least privilege.
Adopting a password management tool was and continues to be a legal requirement for us but it’s also just more efficient. Sharing passwords with colleagues, setting up new people through onboarding, or locking down access on role changes. All of these things help us get to greater business continuity.
What do you like best about using LastPass?
The best part of LastPass is distributing access to key applications throughout the organization. There’s nothing worse than wanting access to an app that you can’t get to. Most of the time when people come to me and ask, ‘how do I get into ... ?’’ I simply reply, “check LastPass.”
How has LastPass helped the Influitive community improve online security practices?
LastPass is a big part of our company security policy (and one of the more fun parts). We’ve started to use the Security Challenge to measure the strength of our passwords and identify where we are most vulnerable. We also use it to teach those who are less familiar with password security using tools like the password generator and the security challenge.
These are the elements of LastPass that directly impact employees and make their jobs easier. Most security policies make things harder for employees, so it’s a nice change.
What would you recommend to those who are new to LastPass?
I would recommend setting up LastPass for the sites they use the most often (especially those where they have multiple accounts), use the LastPass browser extension and just see how quick it is to log in to your services. I would tell them to forget every password they’ve ever remembered, put them all in LastPass, and spend a good 20 minutes creating and memorizing your last password.
LastPass is an essential workplace tool for us because…
It keeps us secure AND it’s the best way to manage the apps we use everyday.
