Cedrah chooses Smartlockr to take back control

Jan-Jaap van Duin is head of ICT at Cedrah, which specialises in providing care for the elderly on multiple locations throughout the provinces of Zeeland and South-Holland: more than 900 clients comfortably rely on the professional care provided by Cedrah’s 1400+ employees.

Many providers, few solutions

Jan-Jaap has been with Cedrah for almost 12.5 years and considers it a great place to work. He took us on a little trip down memory lane and relived how Cedrah and Smartlockr forged a partnership:

“Most healthcare organisations will likely recognise the following: secure communication often depends on other parties, like hospitals, family physicians or pharmacies. Whatever their solution for secure communication, a care provider such as ourselves is often forced to adapt to it. This resulted in us having to use up to four or five different applications to safely send and receive files and emails.

To illustrate, in South-Holland, ZorgDomein was the application of choice, though the client administration ran on Zorgmail.
ZorgDomein, Zorgmail, Zivver…everybody had their own ‘solution’. With Smartlockr this is now a problem of the past.

That in essence was our main reason for choosing Smartlockr: it allowed us to get back in the driver’s seat and bring the number of applications we use for secure communication back to one.

Of course other providers each proposed their own solution, but Smartlockr stood out on account of the totality of its solution. For instance, Smartlockr enables us not only to send and receive emails securely, but also to send and receive large files. We recently finished two large construction projects, so you can imagine we needed to send a lot of architectural drawings back and forth. This is something we used to do with Dropbox and WeTransfer, methods that do little to secure files. Smartlockr really made a difference there.

Right now, we’ve got this project manager who regularly needs to send drawings of 40 MB or larger. Usually you wouldn’t be able to do this within your own environment, but with Smartlockr it’s simply very easy and safe. That’s a huge advantage to us.”

Onboarding Smartlockr

Cedrah is currently in the midst of onboarding Smartlockr. Jan-Jaap shares his experiences with this procedure.

“Right now we’re setting up the technical side of things. It’s a smooth experience so far. Smartlockr’s a good listener and provides us with people who know what they’re talking about, something that’s not as common as it used to be."

"The next step is to get Cedrah employees on board with secure communication. I’ve kickstarted this by publishing a piece about innovation in our company magazine, but I already see a substantial amount of Cedrah employees that’s eager to start. People regularly ask me when they can start using a secure email solution.”

Introducing Smartlockr to stakeholders 

A number of colleagues clearly don’t require a further introduction to Smartlockr, but what was it like for the first stakeholders when they first got to know Smartlockr?

“I honestly don’t remember how exactly we got in touch with Smartlockr. I might’ve seen a name or logo a couple of times, perhaps even spoken to one of your colleague’s this one time.

The reason we started to actively pursue a solution was that we wanted to get full control over the way we communicate securely. This meant finding a fully faceted application, one that would also enable us to send and receive large files securely.

When scouring the market it quickly became clear most parties only offer a partial solution, are very expensive, or both."


“If I were to grade Smartlockr, I’d give it 7 or 8 points out of 10.”
“Is that a good grade?”
“Let’s just say that if every aspect of my department got a 7 or 8, I’d be getting a bonus!”


Smartlockr’s patience and willingness to work the problem with us, as opposed to more common and decidely pushier sales strategies, also factored into our decision making process. Smartlockr first provided me with a demo of their product, followed by giving the same demo to all our stakeholders. The choice for Smartlockr turned out to be a unanimous one.

The user friendliness of the application perfectly aligns with our desire to take back control of our data policies. Take for instance the feature that triggers a user the moment their email contains a word that points to sensitive data. That’s a real plus for us.

Lastly Smartlockr gives our employees the freedom to write as they feel fit, without having to come up with coded language on the spot. It’s another benefit of secure emailing: communication becomes a much smoother experience. And of course at the end of the day it increases the safety of our patients”