How Dovetail uses 1Password to save time and reduce IT support

With over 100 employees in Sydney and San Francisco, Dovetail helps teams turn customer data into actionable insights the whole organization can access through one intuitive, collaborative, and searchable insights hub.

One of Dovetail’s core company values is to “put the customer first.” That’s why they’re SOC 2 Type II and GDPR compliant, and encrypt all data in transit via TLS 1.2. And why keeping data private, secure, and compliant is paramount for the organization’s IT manager, Jan van der Kolk.

“I’m responsible for onboarding and offboarding employees and any IT support tickets,” Van der Kolk explains. “If anyone has issues or needs access to certain tools, I manage that. I also manage our tech stack, all the apps we use across the business, and their security settings. I make sure we have proper security practices set up.”

Van der Kolk juggles a lot of competing demands that go well beyond security.

With a fast growing business, Van der Kolk wanted to introduce a tool that would scale while also making it easy for everyone to follow best security practices. As Van der Kolk says: “We’re a startup and as we grow it becomes harder but also more important to have a company culture that emphasizes security.”

Because of his extensive previous experience as an IT Manager, Van der Kolk understands the importance of choosing the right tool for the job – not only making security compliant, but also user-friendly.

More than 35% of employees have procrastinated, delegated, or skipped setting up new work security apps because of burdensome login processes – a trend Van der Kolk is all too familiar with. If security tools are hard to use, they won’t be used at all.

Dovetail doesn’t have that problem with 1Password. “I’ve been a long-time 1Password fan,” Van der Kolk says. “I use it personally with my family as well. It’s my most used app! For work we just log in to tools non-stop throughout the day. 1Password makes the whole process seamless.”

With 1Password Business, every Dovetail employee also has access to a free 1Password Families account, so they can practice good security habits at work and at home. This helps reinforce the importance of taking security seriously in all aspects of life and gets the team comfortable using 1Password.

Van der Kolk includes 1Password in his security training so he can highlight why employees should take security seriously, and the role 1Password plays in protecting everyone’s data.

“During the onboarding process, we set up 1Password, explain how we use it, and why it’s important,” he says. “In the first week, every new hire goes through security awareness training where we talk about password managers and security more broadly, and why it’s important for us.”

Dovetail uses shared vaults in 1Password to organize information and give individual departments – including finance, operations, and engineering – everything they need to do their work.

95% of employees at Dovetail have adopted 1Password into their daily routine. 1Password helps them create passwords on the fly and log in without any hassle.

Van der Kolk knows that the benefits of adopting an enterprise password manager go beyond keeping employees safe. Using 1Password also signals to Dovetail’s customers that they take security seriously.

“Using a password manager is an important part of us being SOC2 compliant, which is important in keeping our customers’ trust,” he says. “They can check we are compliant and that we take security seriously.”

“We’re not just compliant because we have to be compliant,” he adds. “Once you lose trust, and once you have a security incident, you can’t really get trust back again. So we just want to do it right from the start.”