Elementa chooses Proton Pass for improves securit and easier collaboration
At a glance
Company Profile: Elemnta
Industry: Software development | Wealth management | Financial consulting
Company size: 11-50
Problem: Elementa develops solutions for many different partners, so it needed a secure, ISO 27001-compliant solution that would allow admins to easily monitor activity, control access, and share logins.
Achievement: Elementa uses Proton Pass to create customizable shared vaults that it shares across teams and with clients. Elementa admins can also monitor password uses and changes for a granular overview of activity. The entire Elementa engineering team has adopted Proton Pass.
Why Proton Pass was the right fit:
End-to-end encrypted and ISO 27001 compliant
Ability to share sensitive data with secure links and shared vaults
It gives admins oversight into user activity
Admins can easily enforce 2FA, turn off outside sharing, and revoke access
In the advice and wealth industry, advisors and their businesses use technology to find cost savings, offer new financial products for clients, and improve client experiences. But due to legacy technology, cost, and sometimes a lack of innovation, some businesses struggle to offer modern solutions.
Elemnta was born out of the desire to create human-centric and effective solutions for financial advisors and their clients. Since 2021, the team at Elemnta has been building custom applications for businesses, such as product providers and group and retail life insurance.
Elemnta initially targeted B2C clients but has shifted to B2B, aiming to resolve automation problems and improve business processes for financial product providers. By working with Elemnta, financial advisors can use tailor-made solutions to analyze client data, automate processes, and grow their businesses.
Building custom products
Creating a personalized tool requires keeping track of many moving parts. There’s the building itself, which involves engineers and analysts collaborating in many different systems. To build and test products, the team needs to grant access to the right people to the right information. Robert Ong, CTO at Elemnta, explains how access management is approached:
When we actually connect with different businesses, there are cases where it's just the people like me or the engineering leads that have access to those systems,” he said. “The agreement was okay, since we have access, we actually just share the passwords to specific key people.
Access to information is granted based on need, and access management is overseen by Ong and engineering leads. But this can be a manual and repetitive process, as revoking access once a password has been shared is time-consuming. Ong noted that he wants “to be able to share that access to other people on our team without the need for me to always constantly give them that access.”
There’s also data compliance to consider. As an Australian business, Elemnta is compliant with the ISO 27001 international standard for information security management. To guarantee compliance, the business must carefully consider how and where they store sensitive financial and personal data. Sharing access must be granted on a need-to-know basis, and the login credentials to access partner data must be stored securely.
Introducing Proton Pass
Elemnta was looking for a password manager that would streamline their password sharing practices without compromising their security. Elemnta ultimately chose Proton Pass because the team needed better sharing, granular controls, and activity monitoring.
Proton Pass also offers end-to-end encryption, protecting business data while working to help everyone within a business take control of their digital privacy with Dark Web monitoring and weak/reused password reminders.
Protect your business with Proton Pass
With Proton Pass, your organization’s credentials benefit from the same battle-tested end-to-end encryption that has protected Proton Mail for over a decade.
Gaining a complete business overview
Ong emphasized that the business has a need for control and monitoring:
“We have very sensitive data. One thing that I am really happy with what Proton Pass offers is the logs that you can actually see who has used it, who has items filled.”
With Proton Pass, Ong is able to see a log of password uses and changes, filtering by IP address, type of event, and date range. This allows him better visibility over where data is being stored and shared.
Pass allows admins to set policies enforcing two-factor authentication and disabling sharing outside the organization, improving the business’s cybersecurity without extra manual work from Ong. Team members are encouraged to use Pass to store their sensitive information, as well as update, store, and autofill passwords.
Easier collaboration
Since the team at Elemnta shares access to the tools they build with clients, it’s important to have cross-organizational collaboration. All actions the Elemnta team take in their production environment trigger support items that get sent to the client’s team. Ong and his team are able to access the data stored in all of their vaults. In Proton Pass, vaults are customizable spaces to store specific data. Employees can be granted access based on need, as well as clients.
“We have a shared vault for the entire senior leadership team, plus the core leads in our team,” Ong said, “because there are instances where we need to take a look at some of the data points there.”
Streamlining workflows
Proton Pass has become useful for purposes outside of data security. Ong and his team have been able to use the password autofill function to quickly access test environments when they’re building tools for clients. He noted that Pass is used for
“for storing and autofilling client details, for example, first name, last name, and date of birth. There are parts of our regression testing where our test team shares products, or release products or version updates, and they take advantage of it. A one-click autofill makes it quicker for them to go through different test cases.”
Success with Proton Pass
Using Proton Pass has given Ong and the wider team an additional understanding of the risk profile within the business:
“When we start talking about business risk, I can report about metrics on how much we've actually adopted the security tools that we've deployed on the business so I use it as a way to report the percentage of adoption.”
Across the business, Elemnta has seen 80 to 85% adoption, with the engineering team reaching 100% adoption.
When Elemnta engages with clients, the team has an extra tool in their arsenal to prove that they’re fully compliant with data regulations as well as proactive in their approach to security.
Ong said the ability to create shared vaults and easily manage access has saved time and improved collaboration:
“The entire engineering team has centered our access around it. When a password expires, the moment I actually update that password in a shared vault, it cascades to everyone immediately. So there's this quick turnaround. We don't even have to wait for any updates before the passwords are updated”
The team is happy with their new password manager – Ong said he advocated for the product himself:
“I'm happy that we're using Proton Pass. Personally I've actually been using Proton Mail ever since 10 years ago. I honestly wanted to push for it.”
If you’re interested in working with Proton Pass, contact our sales team to learn more.