Customer Overview
Deltion College in the Netherlands is a secondary vocational school for young adults and professionals with one main campus and two smaller branches, all based in the Netherlands. The population of over 19,000 faculty, staff, and students ranges from teenage students who grew up with technology to older staff and students who are still adjusting to new tools.
deltion.nlChallenge
Robert Vos, Manager of Information & Automation, must ensure that tools introduced to the college are secure and effective, but also user friendly for a wide variety of skill levels. Vos knows his faculty was used to relying on spreadsheets and other decentralized forms of password storage that are impossible for IT to manage and ultimately insecure. They needed a secure password management tool that would generate strong passwords. Before using a password manager, the IT team shared credentials and commonly found themselves resorting to simple, insecure passwords just so they would be easy to remember.
Solution
Vos and the IT team of around 30 began using LastPass more than three years ago to share and distribute access securely, without sharing the password itself. They let LastPass create unique, strong passwords, place them into folders and share with those who need access. Plus, password changes are automatically updated, which eliminates manual emails or desk visits to keep everyone informed, improving secure access.
This year, Deltion is expanding its use of LastPass to all 1,400 faculty members and providing LastPass Premium accounts to its student population of 18,000. The college wants students to focus completely on their education, without being distracted by password frustrations.
“We’re trying to deliver security to students, and also educate them to use the right tools, all without any cost to the students themselves,” Vos says.
Results
With LastPass, Vos and Hans Hoeven, Security Officer at Deltion, have greater visibility into password hygiene that impacts overall college security. Hoeven creates reports to show which users have insecure passwords and enforces better habits with those employees. LastPass has also made it easier to keep track of credentials with the vault that’s accessible from any device, but also provides the ability to search for URLs, domains or even notes associated with a site.
Vos also worked with his Executive Board to implement LastPass, and they concluded that the use of strong, unique passwords that faculty and students could access from any device would greatly improve the security of the college.
