We had a great EDUCAUSE Member QuickTalk | NET+ LastPass on 3/31/2022! Many thanks to Aaron Baillio, Chief Information Security Officer (CISO), and Jonathan Killgore, IT Specialist, at the University of Oklahoma for sharing how they deployed NET+ LastPass on their campus. There were 57 participants on the call to listen and ask questions. EDUCAUSE QuickTalks, in-person conferences, and NET+ community events are a great way to learn about how your peers are solving problems on their campuses.
During this QuickTalk, we learned how OU deployed NET+ LastPass with MFA enabled to almost 13,000 faculty and staff to help them better manage their passwords. Baillio and Kilgore also described engagement with students at the start of the semester to introduce them to self-service enrollment using LastPass to improve student password hygiene. As part of the initial project planning to deploy LastPass, they involved a broad range of stakeholders to identify the needs of their community. Their deployment was more successful than they expected and didn’t result in many calls to their helpdesk. Baillio discussed one area of interest to many campuses, which is distributed administration. He described how they used the managed companies’ functionality to enable distributed administration with multiple different roles for Helpdesk, Endpoint Admins, departmental management, and others. One participant on the talk commented about how on their campus the families as a benefit (mentioned in the last NET+ LastPass program update!) helped them with gaining support for their deployment.
The recording can be accessed on the EDUCAUSE Member QuickTalk | NET+ LastPass webpage.
I also mentioned a NET+ LastPass program update blog post that was posted this morning when I gave an overview of the program. If you have any questions about the NET+ LastPass program, please feel free to reach out to me with any questions.
Time is flying by and keeps getting away from me! There have been several changes to the program since our last NET+ LastPass update in December 2020 that I will highlight here, including updates on LastPass transitioning to an independent company, the 2021 program update, and LastPass feature and functionality as well as answering a frequently asked question that came up in community discussions. Even though 2021 was another very challenging year for everyone, the NET+ LastPass program has continued to grow with 51 campuses signed up and several more recently added!
LastPass transitioning to an independent company
The NET+ LastPass program was formally launched during a service evaluation in 2014 with a start-up at the time named LastPass at the helm. LastPass was acquired by LogMeIn, and at the end of 2021, LogMeIn decided to transition LastPass back into an independent company. Like the other transitions, this one should have minimal impact on NET+ LastPass campuses. One benefit for campuses will be additional focused development resources being devoted to LastPass accelerating updates. We have been in contact with LastPass and the GoTo team to coordinate on details relating to the transition. Additional information from GoTo on the transition can be found here.
Status update on the 2021 program update
In the 2020 update, the first major update to the program announced campuses would be transitioning from the legacy agreement to the updated agreement that they were involved in developing. We’ve now worked though most of the campuses transitioning to the updated agreement with only a couple campuses on multi-year agreements still to transition.
Update on LastPass features and functionality
LastPass has been busy developing features and functionality of interest to the higher education community:
- There’s a new Google Workspace integration for campuses that use Google as their directory, which makes it easier for you to manage users in LastPass, and for your end users to access their LastPass accounts.
- New dark web monitoring is available that campuses might be interested in. I keep hearing about campuses dealing with the most recent compromised password lists and campuses’ responses. Adding in the dark web monitoring using NET+ LastPass could help alert people when their emails show up on the dark web and potentially help campus information security teams. Users can access the dark web monitoring in their Security Dashboards. For campuses that don’t want their end users to access it, there is a policy for admins to turn this off. If you’ve used this, I’d love to hear your feedback because it could be valuable to campuses.
- LastPass Vault Accessibility Updates: Updates to the LastPass vault completed in May 2021 have removed some of the usage barriers for users with disabilities. After a recent accessibility assessment resulting in 83% WCAG (Web Content Accessibility Guidelines) 2.1 AA Compliance, LastPass’ VPAT documentationis now available for customers under an NDA.
- An extensive list of LastPass new features and future features will be announced regularly through LastPass Insider.
- LastPass is working on an update around the Premium as a Perk aspect of the program updating it to Families as a benefit.
- LastPass recently blogged about cyber liability insurance as many insurance companies are requiring password management and multifactor authentication to reduce premiums.
- LastPass also held a webinar with our partner the REN-ISAC on Password Hygiene in Higher Education: Risks, Solutions, and Strategies that may be of interest to the community. The recording can be found here.
As mentioned in previous updates, we’re discussing a potential service evaluation for LastPass MFA and LastPass SSO. If you’re interested in that, please reach out to me.
Answering a frequently asked question
One of the most frequently asked questions in community discussion pertains to price increases. Why have there been so many price increases? The campuses asking those questions are on direct agreements for LastPass, so I’m not familiar with the details. For the NET+ LastPass program, we have had one price increase for new and existing campuses since the start of the program in 2015. The NET+ LastPass customer agreement also has a term in it that limits price increases for existing campuses to up to 5% annually. This is one of the many strong contract terms that campuses negotiated with LastPass as part of the NET+ LastPass program.
Closing
That’s a lot of updates, so thanks for reading to the end! iIf you have any questions, suggestions, or want to get involved in the NET+ LastPass program, please reach out to me!