My background is in electrical engineering. I have roughly almost thirty years in the industry, mostly in telecom, but the last ten years or so in enterprise. I'm currently in Anchorage, Alaska working for an organization that's Alaska-native company, which is more or less a conglomerate of different business lines. They work on everything from government contracts with NASA to construction to oil field operations, it's a lot of different businesses.

Our Duo Security implementation was done about a little over three and a half to four years ago. It was about six months before I joined the company. It was done in response to a breach in the company that involved compromised credentials.

I have personally been using Duo for as long as I've been in this company, so about three years.

We had a compromise of credentials and it resulted in a breach in the company. Had we had multifactor authentication at that time, we probably would have prevented that breach. In this day and age, I think multifactor authentication is an absolute requirement for anything you're doing.

I lead an IT organization that has a significant amount of technical debt, and we're not in a zero-trust architecture yet. I'm pushing in that direction. Duo helps me considerably with my identity in an environment where I don't have zero trust. It's helping me bridge the gap until I can build a zero trust architecture.

It has improved our cybersecurity resilience. Having multifactor authentication is critical because credential-based authentication is weak and it's going to be compromised. Having that additional factor in your authentication process is absolutely necessary.

Right now, we're only using multifactor authentication. That's the most useful to us right now.

Reduction in risk is the whole point of multifactor. It's authenticating and augmenting the credentials and authenticating the individual that is trying to access your environment. It definitely reduces risk.

I would characterize Duo Security’s user authentication and device verification for helping to prevent identity-based attacks as good. It's intuitive for the users. It's easy to set up. The centralized management for our IT health service desk is good and doesn't take a lot of time. They're skilled with it. I really don't have any complaints.

The Duo Portal for our IT staff is efficient. It's utilized on a daily basis, and they're good with it. So I think it does allow staff to concentrate on other tasks.

I would say it's good at establishing trust for every access request, no matter where it comes from. Anything built by man can be broken by man. So there's always a challenge around that. They're trying to overcome those push bombing and challenges like that, and we're on that journey with them.

Password management is difficult for us, especially for users. We would like to go passwordless. If we can go passwordless then you don't have a password manager.

I am looking at other security features with Duo right now. We're currently looking at the passwordless options. We're looking at VPN displacement options. We're looking at those things right now. We haven't adopted yet.

My impression of the stability is good. I haven't seen issues in the app, the portal, or anything.

Scalability is there. Our organization is somewhere around 5,000 employees, and that is not very many users for a platform like Duo, so I don't see any issues with scalability.

I've been using Cisco support for the better part of 25 years. I've seen good, I've seen bad.

Cisco support has improved over the years, they tend to be better at getting back to you.

The only challenge is finding the right person sometimes. From what I've seen, being a named account is a big deal. When I came to this organization, they worked named accounts, and I worked really hard to become one because I knew the difference, and our support has greatly improved since becoming one. I have a person I can call and I know they can find the right person to help me get my problem solved.

There are going to be problems with any system that's as complex as the products that Cisco sells. That's to be expected. It's really about how you get them resolved and how your partnership is there to make sure you're back up and running. Cisco, I believe, is really committed to that.

I would rate them at an eight because there's no ten and because they have the in-house expertise to solve the problem once you can find them. They have the resources to bring to bear to solve just about any problem you can imagine. They are a committed partner.

I have personally used other multi-factor authentication platforms. I currently do personally use others. Duo was selected by the company before I came there, and I've been very pleased with it.

I would say we have absolutely seen ROI. We have not had another breach that involved a loss of credentials since implementation.

The cost is very comparable to other solutions that I've used. I would in no way see any weaknesses in Duo over the other products, I would say it's a premium product, and it commands a premium price.

I would rate Cisco Duo Security an eight out of ten.

I work in an institution with about 6,000 people. I'm a telecommunications engineer. I use Duo Security as my access point when working remotely. Because I'm a telecommunications engineer, I have to have access to my systems remotely, and our VPN client requires that we go through second-level verification, for which we use Duo Security.

Ours is on-prem. We have on-prem Duo Security. We do not use cloud at this time.

The benefit of Duo Security, for me, is the very easy remote access. I don't have to go through repeated steps to log in to my platform, and it's the same process every time. It works quickly, and it's just that simple.

When it comes to securing our infrastructure from end to end, I wish I could speak more in-depth about that. I do know that Duo Security does identify me as a user, and the folks that need to track who's using it, when, and why. I know that there are very detailed and well-designed reports to let them do that. I am not on that side of Duo Security. Again, as a user, the best part is the ease of use.

At the moment, the ease of use is what is the best feature for me. Once it has been set up and the security can hoc to my mobile device, it's very simple to use my single sign-on, get prompted for a Duo Security, push, go to my phone, accept the push, and I'm done. It's a very simple process.

The only thing I can think of to improve for tech support is to have a dedicated engineer but then I would get an engineer that has priorities in one area or another and maybe not the scope I need.

I like the fact that when I open a ticket, I'm not getting the same caller calling back. I like the variety of support that Cisco offers.

Opening a technical assistant's request is a little challenging at times. I wish that the Cisco website could understand who I am from the chart and just let me in rather than forcing me to pick out my contract number, my address, or something like that. They should make it streamlined, make it simple.

I have been in this current position with Duo Security for two and a half years.

To my knowledge, we are relatively stable. I know there are times when in-house we may have difficulty with servers, connectivity, or databases, but it only happens sporadically. I think in my experience, we've had Duo not work maybe once or twice in the last two and a half years. It usually results in rebooting a server.

When we speak of clients on which Duo Security is deployed, every user in my environment typically has a cell phone and a laptop and we use mobile push. I believe we do use PIN capabilities, as well, but primarily we use mobile push. I suspect that it's on a PC mobile platform.

On average, Cisco's technical support is very good. There are times that I need to go through escalation processes, but once I escalate it, I know that I'm going to get the service I need. The more challenging part for me is defining the problems so that the technical solution reps can help me solve them.

My rating for Cisco technical support would vary depending on what they are supporting for me. I would say they've never dropped below, say, a 7.5, but pretty consistently range in a nine out of ten category.

I think Cisco support works very hard to satisfy my needs as a customer rather than frustrating me.

I believe that they did use a different solution. I actually believe that we did not have multi-level verification on our VPN login when we started out. As a result of COVID, it became necessary to have multi-level verification. That was when Duo Security was introduced. I also understand, this was prior to my employment, that Duo Security was enacted in less than seven days.

As a case for return on investment, I would stretch my exposure and say that the return has been remarkable because we went from full-time, on-premise workers, to full-time remote for everyone for several months. Subsequently, many of our staff now work a hybrid schedule, and Duo Security makes it entirely possible.

When it comes to pricing, the only thing I can say is that working in education, when you buy a product, it has to have value. My assumption is that Duo Security has a great deal of value for its cost.

To advise somebody about Duo Security, I would say it works. It works.

I have not experienced another security program like Duo Security. I don't have a way of rating it other than to say, I'm happy with how it works, and it makes my job easier.

I'll give it a 9.25 out of ten.