AGATE

About AGATE

Since 2018 theAlpine Agency of the Territories (AGATE) supports local authorities and local stakeholders in Savoie in the development and planning of the territory, in the management of local authorities and in assistance to project owners. The agency, which has about sixty employees, also supports local authorities in their transition and digital development. AGATE is therefore endowed with an eponymous division. Alex Chivot, who is a mission officer at the latter, explains his role: “ i am responsible for supporting and deploying the cybersecurity offer, conducting audits on cybersecurity and digital uses »

The meeting with téïcée

AGATE contacted téïcée with regard to these cybersecurity issues and more particularly to support it in the development of a password management service for its members. In this regard Alex Chivot wishes to clarify the context in which the collaboration with téïcée « Since the end of 2022, AGATE has set itself the goal of increasing the level of security of small communities that are not large enough to have a dedicated IT service, in other words, to propose a set of tools that will drastically strengthen the cybersecurity of communities. For several years now, the State has been pushing communities to dematerialize their services and, as Alex Chivot explains, the role ofAGATE and its digital hub is to support them in this evolution.

What's at stake? Have a solution that adapts to a public not very aware of the IT tool

As such, the challenge becomes all the more important as the community is small because, in the face of cybersecurity, “lThe little ones are not armed […] we are sometimes confronted with a form of electronicism, namely staff who do not always know how to use the computer tool ».
In this context, the challenge, for téïcée, was to find an effective password manager adapted to an audience with little awareness of security issues and, more broadly, little training in IT. But beyond that, the challenge was to propose a device capable of facilitating the substantive work ofAGATE aimed at convincing, reassuring, winning membership, and ultimately changing practices that have become very problematic. Alex Chivot shows us, thanks to a very significant anecdote, how crucial the implementation of a password manager is “ I have a concrete example! As recently as yesterday, I installed the clients on the various workstations and, in this municipality, the common passwords were all stored in an Excel file that was freely accessible on a common server…
So we have a hundred passwords and identifiers in an Excel file, in a folder on the server! So a person who manages to break into the network would have access to all the passwords without any more difficulty... ” After testing different solutions AGATE decided for the Open Source solution vaultwarden in proposed by téïcée whose neat ergonomics was the most likely to convince a poorly trained audience “the tool I find very ergonomic and really very practical, it's really very intuitive… I find it much more ergonomic than most other password managers… Visually it's less eye-catching… It's more user friendly than other password managers,” says Alex Chivot.

Very good feedback, especially on the “practical” side of the solution vaultwarden

« We were satisfied with all our exchanges and all our needs… responsiveness and response to needs that is satisfactory and adapted… ” Listening skills and advice of téïcée thus seem to have hit the mark by promoting an ergonomic and intuitive solution that greatly helps the work of supporting an audience that is not well-trained in computer science. “ We have good feedback… positive feedback is really about the practical aspect. »
Beyond the proposal it is also the reactivity of the support of téïcée which is appreciated by Alex Chivot “ The support is very responsive and all our requests find answers and

When we want to deploy a new community, we open a ticket and it's processed within the day

very satisfactory solutions and very quickly. As soon as we need to create instances, that is to say a new password box for a new community, we put a ticket on the support and it is processed during the day. »
It is therefore through evolutions and the implementation of new features that Alex Chivot sees the continuation of the collaboration between AGATE and téïcée « An improvement? Yes, we would like to be able to consult the access logs to the vaults in order to establish usage statistics on the tool. That would be to see how many connections we have per day. It's a fairly recent feature, and it was primarily intended to be used to track the use of the solution, how it's being adopted by the communities, to detect and understand potential difficulties, to identify problems, and so on. In short, information that isn't necessarily spontaneously reported by the communities.»