Mary Kay Promoted Password Security with LastPass

Customer overview

The Mary Kay brand is recognized and renowned by millions, selling its beauty products in over 40 countries, making it a global business.

We are very serious about cyber security and through our security ambassadors’ program we continuously educate our people about cyber risk. LastPass is a core tenant in mitigating that risk. Security Engineer, Information Security Team, Mary Kay

Challenge

Sizeable organizational footprints come with increased cybersecurity risks due to the high volume of access points to the organization. For Mary Kay, this was true for its marketing department – particularly branding and social media.

The company needed a secure way to share credentials with trusted partners (internal and external) without putting its business – and its many sales representatives around the globe – at risk. Similarly, Mary Kay’s developers needed a solution to create one set of shared credentials that everyone could securely use to access the same project.

As Jay Patterson notes, Mary Kay needed to improve their overall security posture: “There were sticky notes under keyboards, stuck to monitors, or written in notebooks. We wanted to make passwords more complex.”

Like many large organizations, Jerry and the team knew the solution needed to integrate with their existing technology for a more seamless deployment.

Solution

Mary Kay needed a solution that would ultimately reduce its exposure to cybersecurity risks. Admins sought a tool that would provide a convenient way to create and manage passwords for its employees and grant (and revoke) access to trusted partners. Finding the right solution would start with employees to ensure they saw value in the tool, which heavily influences adoption and usage.

In 2015, Mary Kay chose LastPass with the plan to “start small, and based on adoption and usage, grow accordingly,” Patterson says. “Now we have employees asking if they can have LastPass within their teams and departments, which is a huge positive.”

Like many enterprises, Mary Kay sought a password management solution to balance the highest level of security with a simple user experience. Moreover, the ability to integrate their password manager with other security solutions was critical.

Mary Kay uses LastPass alongside Microsoft SSO. “Every application we onboard needs to work with Microsoft SSO or LastPass,” Patterson says. “This reduces the volume of passwords that employees have.” Integrating security tools ensures that every access point and login is protected, with password management securing any applications not covered by SSO.

Results

LastPass is one of the applications our teams come looking for, we no longer need to promote it, and that’s why adoption is over 70%. It’s an easy win for the security team and its easy for the employees to create and manage complex passwords that they don’t need to remember. Security Engineer, Information Security Team, Mary Kay

Since its introduction in 2015, LastPass is now central to the Mary Kay cybersecurity strategy. Specifically, leveraging the LastPass application across all devices is a great feature, but the browser extension has been a big winner with employees: “It makes people’s lives so much easier.”

Improving security includes promoting security awareness, too, which is why the Mary Kay security team sends monthly communications – including safety tips from LastPass – to align employees with the current security landscape.

Mary Kay drives security further by encouraging employees and, as Patterson adds, “all the people in the family to be more secure,” LastPass Families for employees. Families for employees improves professional and personal password hygiene practices so employees can share their security habits at home.

Mary Kay also achieved a successful deployment and rollout of LastPass thanks to their personal customer success manager, with Patterson saying, “Our customer success manager is a great guy, we can lean on him, and he is brilliant to work with!”