From credential chaos to peace of mind: how Bitwarden solidified security at Hillbrook Anglican School

Founded: 1986
Size: 250 employees
Industry: Education
Location: Enoggera, Australia
Previous solution: LastPass

Hillbrook Anglican School teaches 900 students in grades 7-12 at its campus in the suburbs of Brisbane, Australia. In addition to its student body and teaching faculty, Hillbrook Anglican School also includes departments encompassing IT, finance, enrollments, and marketing. The school is well-respected for its strong academics and comprehensive curriculum. With a holistic view towards maintaining its stellar reputation, Hillbrook sought a robust password management solution for keeping sensitive student and administrative information secure.

Due to prominent data breaches affecting their prior solution, Lee Pickering, Hillbrook Anglican School Director of IT, grew increasingly concerned about their reliance on the tool. Pickering also noticed a serious shortcoming when managing credentials saved by previous staff members. Taking ownership of these passwords proved exceptionally difficult and time-consuming. Pickering and the IT team researched alternatives, narrowing their search down to reliable and secure password managers that were worth the school’s time, money, and energy.

Pickering understood Bitwarden, having used it at his prior employer. He knew it was a platform-agnostic solution that offered considerable flexibility and ultimately chose to deploy it across the Hillbrook administration. Benefits that stood out included personal and organizational vault functionality with the ability to transfer data between them, Bitwarden Collections, which enabled departmental segmentation, and the ability to offer department managers ownership over their collection and sub-collections. Hillbrook currently breaks out Bitwarden Collections by department such as IT, finance, or marketing. “Although IT sits over the top of everything, we enable departmental managers to control their passwords, which allows for a large degree of autonomy,” said Pickering. “Bitwarden just works so well for our needs.”

With Bitwarden in place, Pickering has newfound peace of mind across the board. “Now, staff can come and go without password ownership hurdles,” he said. “It’s much easier to retain passwords when staff leave.” That Bitwarden meets the Australian “Essential Eight” cybersecurity framework was also critical, as was the ability to comply with NIST international standards. 

Since deploying Bitwarden, Hillbrook experiences easier and secure cross-department password sharing, eliminating the need to write down passwords or send them via email. Concurrently, the staff has moved away from a reliance on browser-based password managers — a common but risky strategy for managing passwords — in favor of the Bitwarden browser extension. “There was some initial hesitation about rollout due to the habit of saving passwords in browsers, but the Bitwarden browser extension really took that sting away,” said Pickering. Alongside its transition from browser password managers, Hillbrook integrated Microsoft Entra ID with Bitwarden for seamless SSO, with MFA in place for most users. Staff have also come to rely on Bitwarden for storing notes and credit card information for organizational use.

The Hillbrook IT team took a transparent and communicative approach towards onboarding. “IT was on board first and we proved it worked quite well,” said Pickering. “We then rolled it out to our finance team with other departments coming on board soon after. Overall, onboarding was smooth and our staff were very supportive.” Pickering focuses on educating users about the benefits of Bitwarden at first touch and emphasizes the importance of making the master password as strong as possible. With a nod to ‘Lord of the Rings,’ Pickering said he often positions the master password as “the one password to rule them all.”

Hillbrook is planning to expand its Bitwarden seats tenfold, with future rollout encompassing its teaching staff. This will include comprehensive training and onboarding, especially for teachers who haven’t used a password manager. “We’ll share information about what’s coming down the pipeline, videos about the product, demo it during all-teacher sessions, and hold one-on-one sessions about how the product functions. Our goal is to assist with the initial journey so it will be less overwhelming.”

Pickering strongly recommends Bitwarden to other organizations, including educational institutions. “The flexibility of the system, ease of taking ownership during staff transitions, and considerable security improvements Bitwarden offers have made our lives much easier and stress-free.”

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