Customer Spotlight: Robert Lowry, VTS
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It's not every day that we meet somebody as passionate and excitable about online security as us at TeamPassword. In May, we met our match.
Robert Lowry is the Director of Information Security at VTS, a New York-based startup that prides itself as the #1 platform for leasing and asset management. VTS has been a longtime user of TeamPassword. His company was already well acquainted with our password manager when he started, back in August 2015.
Lowry has always worked in the world of cybersecurity. After college, he began stints at the Department of Defense and Federal Reserve, then followed a friend and colleague to NASDAQ at a time when application security was really taking off. He took the opportunity to work with VTS as his interests in SAAS grew. "I knew I didn't want to go to any old startup," Lowry admits, "B2B is my expertise and VTS fit like a glove."
Daily Workflow
As Lowry rounds out his first year one at VTS, he finds himself enjoying the many hats the startup lets him wear and loves coming up with creative solutions to everyday security issues. He's a stakeholder on the Platform Team, managing and working with team members to ensure the platform is following the right procedures. This includes monthly dynamic scans and code scans on the platform side, granting the right level of account access, and making sure applications and services are integrated properly on the organizational side.
Lowry even has a hand in sales. When a customer has a question about the company's security, he'll put together a document describing how VTS' procedures work and is happy to jump on the phone to answer follow-up questions.
VTS + TeamPassword
It goes without saying that somebody who has spent the entirety of their career in cybersecurity needs a reliable service to securely store and share passwords. Lowry describes TeamPassword as, "a secure way to share your passwords with teammates or other people in your organization, in a world where you can't really." He recognizes the hard truth that when it comes to passwords, many companies just write them down or add them to an insecure spreadsheet, even when told not to.
Lowry uses TeamPassword every day. It comes in handy at times when teammates are on the road and they need access to credit card information from Finance, or when a new hire needs the wifi password. Everybody in the company has access to certain accounts, such as the product blog, so having a way to share those particular passwords is a lot easier than creating some "easy to remember" password, and rotating it out every so often. "Pretty much anything sensitive, we've come to rely on TeamPassword as a place to store it."
When asked what he would do to improve TeamPassword, there was one thing Robert Lowry felt very strongly about: integrating Saml. "Saml integration would be big for us," he shares. "Coming from NASDAQ, anytime we were integrating with a third party, using Saml was one of my requirements for our vendors." Alongside Saml, Lowry also feels strongly about enforcing 2-factor authentication.
Lowry's passion for cybersecurity really shines through when he speaks on TeamPassword's strengths and where he thinks the service could improve. "The whole model, as a security person, is really the right way to do things," he says.
