How Y42 quickly onboards new team members with 1Password

Hai Nguyen Mau, VP of Operations at Y42, is tasked with designing and refining the systems that allow everyone to get their work done – both securely and efficiently. He loves how simple 1Password makes it. “We need to make sure everyone has the right credentials, and 1Password is part of our infrastructure for doing that. It’s turned out to be a superpower,” Hai says.

Y42 uses 1Password to:

• Scale company onboarding so more people can be brought on quickly and securely
• Ensure secure usage of company and customer data across a growing team
• Make sure everyone has fast, easy access to the logins they need – and only the logins they need

How Y42 structures 1Password vaults to simplify onboarding

Hai takes advantage of 1Password’s granular permission settings to streamline onboarding.

Ensuring proper permissions starts by giving each team its own vault. First, he created a hierarchical company structure and assigned each level a vault. There’s a company-wide vault (Level 1), a vault for Marketing (Level 2), and a vault for Growth Marketing (Level 3), for example, plus vaults that are shared across teams.

Hai then placed team members into groups which automatically grant access to vaults (i.e. access levels) appropriate for their job role. “Because privileges are set per group, we just put the new person in a group and they automatically have access to what they need,” he says.

The process has dramatically simplified the onboarding process. “It’s super user-friendly,” Hai says. “I had almost no trouble onboarding during our growth phase. We had to onboard five, six, seven people at a time — all of them new to all of the apps that we use — and it was never a problem.”

Maximizing adoption with education

There are so many ways 1Password saves Hai time, and he wanted to make sure everyone else in the company was taking full advantage of them.

He held micro-workshops on all the tips and tricks he’d learned on his own and from 1Password’s onboarding specialists – things like Touch ID and two-factor authentication. “We put all that info into a knowledge base” to streamline future onboards, Hai says.

Scaling faster with 1Password

Y42 recently rolled out Okta’s single sign-on (SSO) solution company-wide. As part of the knowledge base, Hai created an internal post titled “How to become 10x more productive within Okta using 1Password.”

“We use both tools to authenticate… We realized we can connect teams and identities to 1Password and auto-deploy groups.” Still, Hai’s not finished with the 1Password deployment - he plans to scale the company’s use of 1Password as they grow.

“We’re deploying 1Password Secrets Automation to our DevOps teams right now, and integrating 1Password into our infrastructure. So we’re using 1Password to its fullest extent.” In the future, Y42 plans to hire an IT security manager to handle compliance. “1Password will support us in getting SOC2 and ISO27001 [compliance] done,” Hai explains.

Streamlining workflows securely with Touch ID

It’s hard to measure the impact of great security, Hai says. “It’s the absence of something bad happening.”

Still, the difference that 1Password has made is felt across the company. The biggest changes have been “the [reduced] complexity of team setups, how we distribute credentials, and the speed of onboarding,” Hai says.

But the most noticeable impact is streamlined workflows. “My favorite feature is Touch ID,” Hai says. “If you’re working and you’re in a flow, you don’t want to be distracted, and going somewhere to authenticate takes you out of your flow. 1Password helps you stay in the zone. That’s how seamless it is.”

Ultimately, though, Hai likes to think about the big picture and focus on his primary goal: secure growth. “Using 1Password was a huge enabler for us to get to this stage. It’s helped us grow and onboard this many people without the feeling of not knowing what people are doing or how secure we are. That’s not an option, because we’re handling a lot of customer data. I don’t know how I would’ve done it without [1Password].”

Rob Boone

Content Marketing Manager