Technology Consulting Firm Leans On Bitwarden to Navigate Data Complexities

For Hylaine, meeting the needs of clients involves tapping consultants that can serve as scrum masters, project managers, and program managers. For clients with application development concerns, Hylaine consultants are well-versed in programming languages and able to build software to help a customer solve problems. On the business development side, consultants consist of programmers who specialize in data, building new ETL (“extract, transform, load”) pipelines, and designing data warehouses from scratch. Each Hylaine consulting team and project is custom-tailored, with teams often consisting of different consultants from multiple practice areas.

McElroy, who was involved with Hylaine early on, wanted to take a fresh look at how Hylaine organized and secured its considerable and wide-ranging knowledge and data. In his evaluation, he identified different information stores across the company. There were firm-level assets that detailed HR policies and business best practices; assets related to business lessons learned; client histories and onboarding; and client enterprise architectures. Hylaine also stored data pertaining to client projects and of course, very sensitive client data that needed to be segmented and protected.

Said McElroy, “We try to make projects available to almost anyone in the organization. We want consultants to be able to move from project to project and be able to help each other when necessary. As part of our whole-firm approach, we believe leaders should instantly get whatever they need. But, in certain cases some client secrets have to be locked down and accessed only on a need-to-know basis. This critical information is provided by clients that trust us to utilize the highest security standards to protect their data.”

Upon deciding to reorient and strengthen its internal data security protocols, Hylaine chose to deploy the Bitwarden Password Manager across the organization. Said McElroy, “We started receiving feedback that the decision to integrate Bitwarden was a great example of how seriously we were taking security and our commitment to organizing our data, regardless of the chaos of consulting work.”

Hylaine immediately benefited from the ability to cordon off sensitive data to certain teams, opting to use the Bitwarden collection and folder architecture when necessary. “One limitation to our previous password management tool was that when we provided access to a client folder, everyone who was assigned to that client would get all the information in it,” said McElroy, “whereas with Bitwarden, there is a granularity there that allows us to be even more prescriptive.”

Hylaine is also thrilled with the “one stop shop” nature of Bitwarden, in that it makes everyday tasks - such as accessing the WiFi password - a straightforward process. The intuitive, easily accessible Bitwarden Password Manager also negates the need for a conflicting repository that contains sensitive information. 

Hylaine is similarly pleased with Bitwarden Send. Previously, the company relied on file drops and instant messaging to communicate sensitive data. Said McElroy, “The Bitwarden Password Manager and the Bitwarden Send feature has been a far superior solution. It is a specialized tool that is really fit for our purposes.”

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