CASE STUDY Ravensburger Solves the Password Puzzle with Keeper Security

About Ravensburger

Ravensburger AG is an international group with several renowned toy brands. Its mission is: "Encourage discovery of what really matters." Ravensburger products and services promote togetherness, build knowledge and social skills, enable relaxation and create lasting memories. The company´s most important brand, the Ravensburger blue triangle, is one of the leading European brands for games, puzzles and arts & crafts as well as for German-language children's and youth books. Toys with the blue triangle are sold worldwide.

The international brands BRIO and ThinkFun expand the group's portfolio. Ravensburger has been a family business since it was founded in 1883 and is shaped by tradition and grown values. In 2021, Ravensburger had 2,413 employees and achieved net revenue of EUR 636 million. Ravensburger runs its own plants in Ravensburg, Germany and Polika, Czech Republic.

The Challenge

The Ravensburger IT team supports offices, production sites and colleagues around the world, managing a wide range of operating systems, browsers and applications across its operations. Similar to most companies, the help desk was spending a significant amount of time each week just resolving password-related and user authentication support tickets.

Some employees stored (and were forgetting) passwords with pen and paper. Other employees used their browser's built-in password manager to keep track. While these employees could retrieve their passwords, these password managers presented their own security gaps and challenges, including that they are vulnerable to exfiltration because they aren’t encrypted. They also hamper productivity for global teams collaborating on projects and contributing through shared accounts — like the social media team using the same corporate profiles.

Despite the existence of an IT policy, password- and record-sharing were in effect at the discretion of individual employees. The absence of a technical solution to standardize and facilitate role-based access privileges posed a serious security challenge to forming a holistic defense against cyber threats, especially for a company with a distributed workforce.

Ravensburger found itself in a password labyrinth. The password management solution it chose would need to integrate with Microsoft Azure, which it uses with a local active directory to manage user authentication. Easy end-user functionality, including availability on different browsers and devices, was critical to any future solution. Zwaka and the IT team knew that “if a solution was too complicated for the end-user, they would be making it more difficult” for themselves and their employees ‒ paying instead for a new method to create support tickets.

It was important from a technical view to integrate with our satellite systems. It was also important that the software we chose was simple enough for the average employee to use.

–Benjamin Zwaka, Senior System Administrator

The Keeper Solution

The IT team initially adopted Keeper and then made it available for other departments, including marketing, accounting, finance and business intelligence, where it has quickly established itself as an essential tool for productivity and collaboration ‒ and security too. Integrated multi-factor authentication (MFA) and single sign-on (SSO) options through Keeper have enabled social media and marketing managers to securely collaborate on shared accounts.

More technical users, including those in the development department, are finding Keeper valuable when they need to share password records and SSL certificates. The industry-leading security provided by Keeper, in combination with its ease of use, has drastically reduced the number of password-related support tickets for the help desk.

Ravensburger has also enabled BreachWatch^®, a powerful business monitoring tool that constantly scans employee passwords for exposure on the dark web. It immediately alerts company admins and end-users at Ravensburger when their password may have been exposed on the dark web, notifying them to take action and protect their organization. Risk-level assessments are provided to individual employees and the enterprise overall so users and admins can proactively change weak passwords and set strong ones.

In rolling out Keeper to the wider Ravensburger organization, admins have found the user guides, documentation portal and training videos helpful for admins and employees alike. Keeper’s intuitive user interface has driven quick adoption. Zwaka credits Keeper for improving password management at Ravensburger, along with raising user awareness of security more generally at the company.

Before we introduced Keeper, it was the IT team that was responsible for security. Now, everyone is responsible for IT security. We have software to help everyone get on board and protect the company.

–Zwaka, Senior System Administrator