Cybersecurity company Bitdefender chose Bitwarden for its open-source model

Bitdefender is a cybersecurity company based in Bucharest, Romania, serving more than 100 clients worldwide. The company believes cybersecurity is mission-critical for businesses of all sizes and has many solutions for staying secure. In its years working with customers across all industries, the company has also gleaned a number of insights about IT security habits and perceptions. In turn, this has helped inform Bitdefender about the best strategies for its own protection against cyber-criminals.

Bitdefender understands the importance of ensuring all data is encrypted, running the latest operating systems, and staying on top of security updates. To best keep track of all the tools at its disposal, the team created a cybersecurity risk register. This register catalogues all internal technologies in use, their strengths and weaknesses, and has allowed Bitdefender to make sound financial choices for security budget allocation. One tool that was used internally was a password manager, leaving that responsibility to employees. After careful evaluation, it became clear that had to change and the solution that would best meet their needs was Bitwarden.

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Why Bitdefender chose Bitwarden for password management

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There is a common refrain within the IT security world that it’s a matter of “when, not if” an organisation will experience a data breach. Consequently, an organisation has a duty to limit the damage a particular compromised user, device, or account can do to its business. Ensuring minimal damage means prioritising a robust, centralised authentication system that grants privileged access based on an employee’s role and on a ‘need to know’ basis. Most modern authentication systems also offer single sign-on and multi-factor authentication tools, both of which add an extra layer of efficiency and security.

As it considered its authentication needs - and in part, due to its own internal cyber security training, which emphasised the importance of its employees using password managers - Bitdefender decided to put its money where its mouth was and deploy an enterprise-grade solution to protect every employee and the organisation as a whole.

After drawing up a shortlist of candidates based on its requirements, Bitdefender opted to go with Bitwarden, citing the Bitwarden open-source model as one of the main drivers for its decision. Other deciding benefits included SSO and API integration, strong customer support, and third-party audits.

Bitdefender also knew it did not want to self-host and wanted to have the option of testing the solution before fully committing. The company initially purchased a small number of seats and was delighted when Bitwarden was receptive to its iterative seat increase requests. Bitwarden put in place an automated onboarding process whereby Bitdefender employees simply click a button indicating they want to deploy Bitwarden. This model has allowed the Bitdefender team to keep its budget tight and ensure employees are committed to using Bitwarden in a productive way.

Mihai Talmacel, an Information Security Engineer at Bitdefender, said: “Credential vaults are an extremely sensitive security topic, so we had to go with the best.”

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