Brett Henry
Senior Security Engineer, TrueCar
An online marketplace for new, used, and certified pre-owned vehicles, TrueCar connects thousands of consumers with car dealers and their expansive inventories. It also provides research and shopping tools to help buyers confidently purchase or lease a vehicle that fits their life.
Because TrueCar serves as a conduit of information between dealerships and consumers, it needs a simple, secure way to share data both internally and externally. The organization was using PGP Encryption to protect sensitive information in transit, but that solution was cumbersome and unsustainable for the team to manage long-term. Then, TrueCar discovered Virtru — which has brought unprecedented ease to their secure email and file sharing.
As a result of deploying Virtru’s data-centric security, TrueCar:
It all started with a call that Brett Henry didn’t mean to accept.
A busy Senior Security Engineer, Henry is tasked with managing information security and technology for TrueCar’s team of 750 employees. When he received a call from a member of Virtru’s sales team, he wasn’t ready to make a change to his tech stack at that point in time — but he listened anyway.
“I showed it to a coworker, and we both liked it, but we couldn’t justify buying it at the time. When you're a security team, your desires don't matter,” Henry joked. “Things you think would be nice, if it costs the business money and they don't see value, you're not getting it. But, if the business brings you a use case costing hours and causing friction with partners, this goes from a security pitch to a business pitch, and that's a very different conversation.”
Two months later, Henry received a request from the business — they needed an easier way to securely share files. TrueCar was using PGP Encryption, which was causing a lot of friction for internal users and external partners. Henry immediately remembered his conversation with Virtru, and how easy and lightweight the product was.
“It was the amalgamation of chance and persistence,” Henry recalled. He was ready to continue the conversation.
TrueCar has a small but mighty IT team. With PGP, that team was spending two hours on encryption setup for every external partner — which was not sustainable. Additionally, they had to set up keys for employees (and revoke them when employees left the company), spend time teaching car dealerships and partners how to use the software, and manage key rotation on their own.
“All our teams are over-utilized in terms of time. So to have a tool like Virtru that we could roll out ourselves, that didn’t require a lot of work to put it in the hands of our users, was an advantage.” With Virtru, TrueCar was able to quickly and easily roll out powerful security in Google Workspace, with no setup required for external partners — no software for partners to install, and no new logins or passwords.
“We even had two people on the dealer partner team use Virtru during the demo, even sharing information with partners back and forth to see how it worked for them business-flow-wise, in real life. They were like, ‘Yeah!’”
Virtru’s easy user experience lightened TrueCar’s workload, saving time and resources right away.
A few weeks into their Virtru deployment, TrueCar is seeing significant Virtru usage, as well as receiving good feedback from employees. “These are people-people. They’re not engineers or developers. ” Henry wanted to give them simple tools to get the job done — while protecting sensitive data — as easily as possible.
For TrueCar, that meant integrating Virtru security with the apps their team already uses, effortlessly, every day: Gmail and Google Drive. For files that are too large to share within Google, TrueCar also uses Virtru Secure Share for easy, cloud-native file sharing, in a browser interface.
At the end of the day, people want to do the right thing to protect sensitive data — they just need the right tools in place that won’t create hurdles for them. For TrueCar, Virtru provides a vastly simplified method of protecting information, without sacrificing the ability to collaborate with internal and external partners.
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