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. 

Positive

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.

You don't need any other Cisco security products in order to use it. That's what makes it easy.

Normally, people use it for multi-factor authentication. It's an easy-to-install multi-factor authentication platform.

Regarding the valuable features, I would say that Duo Security is easy to use, has speed, and is dependable.

It would be nice if there was a biometric option rather where you could accept with a fingerprint. Like, in an iPhone, they have fingerprint authentication and face ID. It would be nice if there was a biometric acceptance as opposed to just clicking and accepting.

I have been using Duo Security for thirteen years. I am a distributor of the solution.

Regarding stability, I don't know if that comes into question. With my clients, I haven't seen them facing stability issues.

I have seen it deployed in an organization with 50 people and another with 5,000 people.

I love the solution's technical support. Regarding the adjectives I would use to describe the support, I would say that the support was professional and accommodating. I wish that the support would be a little bit more prompt and a little bit more flexible because there are certain things that they will do and certain things they won't do. Then they push what they won't do back down to the distributor.

I also wish that they consider us as distributors because we're not the traditional partner. It's almost like we are Cisco. I wish that we could share more resources behind Cisco Firewall and behind Cisco's resources. I rate the support an eight out of ten.

Positive

The reason we chose Duo Security over its competitors is because it's a freebie that you can try and see how it goes. There is also the ease of integration with Duo Security. I don't really know of any other MFA that is as simple. With Duo Security, it's like, here's your authorization, and you need to click on the yes or no options.

I would say that the solution does increase security because it does require MFA, and as long as the company enforces it installed on a specific device, it works.

It does not secure my infrastructure from end to end and detect or remediate threats. It's not the function of the product.

Regarding my assessment of Duo Security for establishing trust for every access request, no matter where it comes from, I would say that it is absolutely dependent on how the company deploys it. If the company says just deploy Duo Security on an old device, then it's kind of a hope.

 The whole point of having Duo Security is that it considers all resources to be external. 

Multi-factor authentication in general helped my organization improve its cybersecurity resilience. Any MFA will do that.

I would tell those considering having Duo Security in their organization that it's easy. You don't need to have every other Cisco product out there since I know that, for a fact, you can do it with Sophos and Fortinet. You can do it with other products, not just Cisco.

I rate the overall product an eight out of ten.

We use it citywide. I work for a city, local government, and we implemented it during the pandemic.

We support it for remote access to our network. Every city employee is required to use it, including the police and fire departments. However, it's hard to concretely say if the solution has helped reduce the risk of breaches in one way or another.
Apart from that, we focus on user education in cybersecurity and provide training to our end-user population to heighten awareness. This is in addition to the two-factor authentication, so we don't solely rely on that.

Duo Security has improved our organization from a security standpoint. The two-factor authentication has become a requirement in most cases. It is specifically required by cybersecurity insurance.

Not only are we doing it for requirement purposes, but it also gives us an additional layer of confidence. Duo Security's additional layer of security gives us added confidence that our network will be less likely to get hacked, compromised, or otherwise.

Moreover, we're very satisfied with the solution for helping secure our infrastructure from end to end. It definitely gives us an added layer of our confidence knowing that two-factor authentication is implemented. In our organization, network-wise, the confidence level is fairly high, and we're happy with it.

The way we involve the end users is with their mobile devices and mobile phone numbers. Once they do get involved, we are pretty confident that they are being reached out to through the number that we have in the system for them, and there's really no reason on our end to doubt the validity of those authentication requests when they come through. We trust Duo Security for every access request, no matter where it comes from.

Duo Security has become essential to our environment, considering today's time when our workforce is becoming more and more mobile.

Duo Security helped our organization improve its cybersecurity resilience. It has given that added layer of security and keeps the awareness on the user's end as well.

It's easy to use, frankly. All it takes really is for the end user to download the app. For me, I have an Apple Watch; I don't even have to wait for my phone. I can accept the prompt right there and just be on my way.

Moreover, we are comfortable and have high confidence in the solution's user authentication; device verification can prevent identity-based attacks.

One of the challenges was for the police force. A lot of them, at first, weren't keen on using their personal cell phone for, quote-unquote, city business. As a city, we require them to download an app for two-factor authentication. There is a little bit of apprehension for some users thinking, well, "How do I know this app is not collecting personal information from my personal device?" was the only obstacle we ran into. Overall, satisfaction is good.

To mitigate this problem, there was an option where the city would choose to just go with utilizing the app. There's another option where you can get a text message as opposed to having to download the app and accept what the app has on it.

I have been using Duo Security for three years. 

Duo Security is a stable solution. 

We never encountered any issues in terms of scalability. 

The customer service and support have been very good. We haven't had to call them many times. They've been able to assist every time there was an issue.

The responses have always been timely, and I haven't gotten any complaints from our security manager.

We used a different solution but had it in limited use only for our public safety team. That was a requirement at the time because of the type of information that they had access to. We were looking for something versatile. 

With Duo Security, the easier user access and user adaption were a little easier. We felt the solution was a little clunky at times, and we are already in the Cisco ecosystem, and that's one of their products. So we decided that was the best solution at the time. That's why we switched to Duo Security.

Implementation was fairly easy. Moreover, once you have it implemented, it's very minimal.

Duo Security doesn't require a lot of maintenance. From that standpoint, the solution has freed up time. However, it's not something that we had beforehand. In other words, it's not necessarily alleviating work. However, it is easy to manage.

The pricing was a lot more than what we were paying for our previous solution. However, our previous solution only covered two out of the sixteen departments within the city.

It’s a bit of a pie chart in that sense but we understood that with Duo Security, we were deploying it on a broader scale.

Overall, the pricing was higher than our expectations, but considering the circumstances during the pandemic and the increased demand, we understood the importance of making the right decision and moving forward with the best product.

I would say we are happy with it. However, I haven't conducted any recent market surveys to compare pricing, so it's difficult to make a definitive statement. Ultimately, what matters most is the satisfaction of our end users, and in that regard, it is currently very high.

We did look at some other products. We had a security manager who was responsible for conducting the necessary research and legwork. However, he did present us with a few different solutions, and our network manager was also involved in exploring options. Ultimately, Duo Security was selected as the preferred solution.

And also, what happened right before then, we had attended Cisco Live, had been exposed to Cisco Duo, and really liked what we saw. So we went into it with a bit of bias, to be honest, because we already saw it.

Duo Security is a great solution. The adoption and learning curve for the end user is low, in our opinion.

Overall, I would rate Duo Security an eight out of ten.