Security champion spotlight: Longtime Bitwarden user helps businesses stay secure online

Name: Lou Hill

Bitwarden customer since: 2016

Location: Layton, Utah

Industry: IT services and consulting

Customer type: personal, business, and MSP

Lou Hill, a security engineer and IT consulting firm founder, has been a Bitwarden customer since 2016. When Hill began his search for a password manager, he knew he wanted a solution that adhered to his high security standards. “'I’m very interested in privacy, encryption, and ensuring that everything is very secure,” said Hill, "When I was vetting vendors, Bitwarden was much better than all the other solutions. It was the most private and secure password manager available!” 

After adopting Bitwarden for his personal passwords and sensitive information, Hill was quick to implement Bitwarden at work as well. “The company I used to work for didn't use a centralized password management platform,” explained Hill. Knowing the risks of insecure password management, Hill took matters into his own hands. “For a long time I used two different instances of Bitwarden — one for work and one for personal. That was a really good way to separate work and personal stuff, but still have control over both,” said Hill.

Hill didn’t stop there, he soon recommended Bitwarden to his family as well, helping them achieve strong password security. “I introduced my parents, my cousin, and all sorts of people to Bitwarden,” recalls Hill. “There's probably a lot of people that use it because of me.”

In 2020, Hill founded Cloudbunker Consulting, a firm that specializes in IT and cybersecurity services and helps their clients protect their businesses with the best security technology on the market. 

Cloudbunker adopted Bitwarden for password management across three use cases:

1. Managing daily passwords for Cloudbunker employees

2. Managing passwords for Cloudbunker to access client applications

3. Managing Bitwarden deployments for clients as a Managed Service Provider (MSP)

“Before I went full-time at Cloudbunker here, I upgraded to the Bitwarden business plan,” recalls Hill. Bitwarden helped build the foundation of Cloudbunker security, and as the business grew, employees were gradually onboarded to Bitwarden for secure password management.

Ease-of-use and convenience 

Convenience and usability were key to Cloudbunker’s success with Bitwarden. “The ease of use of Bitwarden is really awesome,” said Hill. “Bitwarden is one of the few products that increases your security in a huge way, but also makes everything more convenient.” Hill credits this ease of use to “the ability to easily and quickly obtain the information you need from a vault and autofill.” This streamlined access is crucial for day-to-day work activities because Cloudbunker stores their everyday passwords in Bitwarden, in addition to credit cards, mailing addresses, and notes. “You can save all sorts of information,” said Hill. “We use it for business credit cards. We also use identities to autofill client addresses and contact info. Secure notes are also great.”

Security insights and reporting 

Bitwarden vault health reports helped Cloudbunker identify and fix high-risk passwords in their organization. “The Bitwarden reused, exposed, and weak passwords reports allow us to have some intelligence and insight into who needs more training on how to safely store passwords and generate them,” explains Hill. Such reports enabled Cloudbunker to put a stop to unwieldy password management practices and ensure employees continue to follow password guidelines.

While Cloudbunker adopted Bitwarden early on to manage day-to-day internal passwords, they also used a different solution to manage Cloudbunker access to client applications. These client applications were deployed and managed by Cloudbunker, so it was important for Cloudbunker employees to have secure and reliable access to these logins for continued IT support.

The original solution was slow and difficult to navigate, impacting the productivity of his team. “The login process was intense." said Hill, “It was also slow to log in and navigate the portal.” Hill also observed his employees struggling with the solution due to its lack of convenience.

Extending Bitwarden security

Armed with experience using Bitwarden for personal and work, Hill thought Bitwarden would be perfect to replace the existing solution they used for storing passwords to client applications. The Cloudbunker team was already using Bitwarden to secure day-to-day passwords, so it was an easy transition to begin storing client passwords as well. “Switching over was easy,” said Hill, “just export and import passwords. No problem.” Once the client passwords were imported, “Bitwarden became our password portal for all of Cloudbunker customers, passwords, and accounts,” according to Hill.

Enforcing least privilege access

With collections, it was easy for Cloudbunker to organize passwords by clients and assign access to the employees that need it. “We use collections for each company we manage,” said Hill, “We then share that collection internally and give permissions to users. Only a few of us have access to all of them.” This approach to permission management ensures least privilege access in the Cloudbunker organization.

After seeing the success of Bitwarden at Cloudbunker, Hill thought their clients would benefit from Bitwarden secure password management as well. After joining the Bitwarden partner program for MSPs, Bitwarden quickly became the default solution for Cloudbunker clients. “Bitwarden is our primary password management recommendation,” said Hill. 

Cloudbunker clients love Bitwarden

Whether clients are seasoned users or new to password managers entirely, “every time we implement Bitwarden, people are just blown away with how awesome it is,” said Hill. “They are shocked at how much easier password management can be.” 

Hill recalled one recent Cloudbunker customer who, prior to Bitwarden, saw employees regularly storing passwords in insecure locations like sticky notes, or forgetting their passwords altogether. Internal productivity also increased: “Bitwarden is much more simple to manage and faster! Productivity has absolutely gone up.”

Putting a stop to insecure passwords

When onboarding a new client, Cloudbunker uses Bitwarden vault health reports to review and update weak, reused or exposed passwords. “It's incredible how many weak passwords clients have,” said Hill. “With Bitwarden vault health reports, we can show them how insecure their passwords are now and how easy it is to make it better.” Hill remembers one client who, upon migrating to Bitwarden, discovered just how insecure their password management practices were. “86% of their passwords were insecure,” said Hill, “and they had hundreds and hundreds of passwords. It was wild to see how many.” By identifying insecure passwords early on, Cloudbunker sets their clients up for password management success.

Cloudbunker intends to deploy Bitwarden to all of their customers, protecting them from brute force attacks and data breaches with secure password management. “We're about to launch Bitwarden to the rest of our clients, which will be about 200 users over the next three or four months,” said Hill. In addition to implementing Bitwarden for Cloudbunker clients, the Cloudbunker team is projected for rapid growth, meaning new Cloudbunker employees will be onboarded to Bitwarden as well. “The goal is to double in the next year,” said Hill. “Bitwarden will scale with us as we grow.”

Hill looks toward this bright future with Bitwarden. “I trust Bitwarden much more than I trust other security companies,” he said. “Bitwarden has every capability that future-proofs our password management.”

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