Hollard Insurance increased its password security using LastPass

Customer overview

Hollard distributes a wide range of innovative insurance products through partnerships with some of Australia’s leading brands, including Woolworths, Ltd.. Hollard’s core products are home and contents insurance, landlord’s insurance, motor insurance, pet insurance, and small-to-medium enterprise (SME) insurance.

Established in Australia in 1999, Hollard has rapidly grown into an established personal and commercial lines insurer in the Australian market. They were recognized as the Large General Insurance Company of the Year at the 2019 and 2021 ANZIIF awards, with over 1.5 million customers and approximately 650 staff who annually settle over 1,000,000 claims in Australia.

Challenge

As a rapidly growing insurance company, investing in identity management, authentication, and password security was high on Hollard’s technology priority list. To ensure they can consistently operate in a resilient, reliable, and secure manner, Hollard was concerned that asking their staff to maintain increasingly complex passwords across multiple systems was becoming impractical.

Improper security behaviors risked passwords being written down and reused, leading to a greater risk of compromised credentials. They also wanted to maintain a catalog of all critical service accounts and passwords to mitigate the risk of staff leaving the organization with that knowledge.

To be able to have a toolset that can help people in their own personal life, as well as make our own enterprise more secure, is a huge benefit. Chief Information Security Officer, Hollard Insurance

Solution

To help address their password hygiene challenges, Hollard implemented a centralized password management system. The solution needed to be easy to use, as user adoption would be critical to a successful implementation. They also wanted a system that their staff could use – both at work and at home – to make it easier to change old habits. It needed to be intuitive for their administrators to store passwords and extract them for when they need to log on to systems.

Choosing a partner with 24/7 global support and a local presence was vital to ensure they could maintain critical security systems at all times. The partner also needed to demonstrate they take their security compliance seriously. Hollard chose LastPass as it met all their essential requirements and offers a trusted, proven, and innovative solution beyond just being an enterprise password manager.

Results

• Hollard successfully deployed LastPass to their IT team in less than one month, reducing the risk of breaches and securing its most critical systems. To make the implementation more seamless, Hollard integrated LastPass with their internal directory system to simplify deployment and used its existing single sign-on and multifactor authentication capability.

• Using tools, guidance, and training from LastPass, users were onboarded in 15 minutes as they could extract and upload existing passwords from current data stores rapidly. Adoption has been strong, with positive feedback from users. Staff have quickly come to rely on the tool and have developed new habits for password management.

• Hollard, in the future, plans to extend the solution to the broader organization to mitigate the risk of being exposed to breaches through their supply chain.

A centralised password management solution is always in my top 10 priority list for cybersecurity as it helps to promote the right culture within an organisation. Chief Information Security Officer, Hollard Insurance