Password management solves a council's IT concerns

LastPass password management has become a critical asset in helping Lockyer Valley Regional Council staff members perform their jobs.

Lockyer Valley Regional Council’s vision is to deliver sustainable services to enhance the liveability of its community while embracing its economic, cultural and natural diversity. The Council strives to enable opportunities within its region with a strong customer focus, and, as a local government authority, it is committed to providing quality services to residents and visitors in the pursuit of its vision.

With the aim of improving security across the organisation, the Council engaged an external auditor to identify risk factors and potential cyber security threats. It was aware that the security practices of general staff weren’t particularly good when it came to storing account credentials, and many helpdesk tickets were being raised to have credentials reset as a result of them being shared between staff members. The ICT team had deployed a tool to manage credentials, but it was too technical and could not scale to cover accounting, consultants, office workers and other departments.

Following the audit, the recommendation was made to deploy an enterprise password management (EPM) solution across the organisation. A team of evaluators was assembled to review the EPM options available. The goal was to find a solution that is easy to use and will deliver the visibility and control that IT security needs.

“When we added up all the scores, LastPass came out on top. It’s just really easy to use, and if you want the organisation to use it, then it needs to work for them as much as it needs to work for IT security,” said Anjana Ranatunge, Coordinator ICT Projects and Business Operations at Lockyer Valley Regional Council.

The Council believes it is close to delivering on its goals, with Ranatunge saying the feedback has been very positive as “people don’t want the hassle of keeping track of passwords, sharing passwords or resetting passwords, so now they do that all via one system”.

“It saves employees a lot of time and many view LastPass as critical to efficiently performing their job,” Ranatunge added.

So far, there has been a significant reduction in calls to the helpdesk and tickets raised for login credential resets, a reflection of the almost-80% adoption rate. This “just shows how user friendly LastPass is,” said Ranatunge.

The security team uses the solution’s admin centre to gain better insights into the security posture of the organisation, and uses policies to help encourage the right staff behaviours.

The LastPass team “excelled at showing us the value of the LastPass suite, which made it easy to sell internally,” said Ranatunge. “I can’t speak highly enough of the LastPass Customer Success Manager. Always positive and had or could source answers promptly.”

Image credit: ©stock.adobe.com/au/thodonal