Cisco Duo - Premier Edition

I have primarily used Cisco Duo  for Identity and Access Management , especially when clients have extensive identity footprints scattered across different business units or locations, with each location maintaining its own Identity and Access Management  system. Centralizing all of that into one single pane of glass as a centralized IAM  solution has been the primary motivation. During the COVID period in 2020 and 2021, remote access VPN usage increased significantly because everyone was working from home. The ability of remote access VPNs to integrate with identity was a major challenge we were struggling with at that time. Moving to a single centralized pane of glass to create entitlements, role-based access controls, and then hooking those into the VPN or VPN access solution was the primary motivator for most of my clients. For a couple of clients, I ran assessments to identify gaps, improvements, and the policies that needed to be configured and tightened.

I worked in the past with Cisco XDR , but not lately. We are primarily relying on Microsoft Defender for our EDR, and for a couple of other subsidiaries, we have Palo Alto XDR , not Cisco. I understand how that solution works, but we did not deploy it extensively because market adoption is lean. Cisco Secure Access  is definitely something we use as SSC, Secure Service Edge, for internet bound connectivity, integrated with Cisco Umbrella .

Cisco Duo  is not doing anything that competitors are not doing. I have worked on Okta as well, and Microsoft Entra ID  has really improved. The primary benefit of Cisco Duo is if you already have an extensive footprint of Cisco products, such as Cisco Secure Access , Cisco Secure Firewalls  or Firepowers, or Cisco Umbrella  deployments, then it becomes very easy to integrate these products together so they work hand-in-hand with deep integration.

Cisco Duo offers phishing resistant IAM  and multifactor authentication (MFA), which relies on Cisco Talos  Threat Intelligence sharing to enrich Cisco Duo with all threat feeds. This provides pinpoint accuracy to determine what is malware or malicious and what is safe.

Identity intelligence is analogous to what Okta or Entra ID does with conditional access. It gives you a complete view of whether a particular user who seems legitimate is actually supposed to get access to applications or not. You can control access and curtail access depending upon the behavior of a user.

MFA is mandatory, and there are multiple ways you can implement it. Phishing resistance is critical because even if a user's account has been compromised, the tool regularly tracks how that particular user accesses applications and where they do it from, creating a baseline. If there is a deviation, which would definitely be the case if the user or user identity is compromised, it asks for step-up authentication or curtails access to the application. This end-to-end phishing resistance feature definitely has an impact on the company's security posture.

The primary issue is adoption. When I used to work for Deloitte, I did consulting and advisory for at least 95 of the 100 Fortune 100 companies. The number of enterprises using Cisco Duo was considerably lower and definitely not at the median. There are other tools that integrate better or whose integrations are not dependent upon SaaS vendors and SaaS applications. This could be related to how the product is positioned or how other companies are doing better with their sales. If a product is not being adopted by a very large footprint of enterprises, you need to start asking questions. Cisco Duo is definitely not doing things that others are not doing, so there is no unique selling proposition. It is definitely doing all the things that others are doing, but the adoption for other vendors is definitely better. I would compare Cisco Duo to Okta and to some extent Azure  Entra ID, because Azure  Entra ID has picked up very well with conditional access policies and Identity and Access Governance . Azure Entra ID also has integrations with SailPoint, which Cisco Duo does in full transparency. The issue is that Cisco Duo is not being adopted by a very large set of enterprises.

I worked on Cisco Duo from 2019 through 2020 and on and off until around three and a half to four years total.

Cisco Duo is fairly stable. They send out scheduled downtime windows for backend maintenance, but it is very well planned. The UI will not be available during this time, so any configuration or operational work needs to be scheduled around these windows. This approach is in line with what other vendors are doing. No significant issues exist. There used to be bugs in the initial days, but they have been taken care of. Every single product has some instability in the initial days, but towards the end of last year, it was not a big deal.

It is Cisco's responsibility to take care of scalability. We have an account manager whom we have always used, and we would inform them that we were going to add 50,000 identities and ask them to ensure that their backend was capable of handling it. We would also inform them about a few hundred thousand login requests over a certain duration, and they would take care of it. We have never faced any challenges where resources were not available.

I would rate Cisco Duo's customer service around seven. Level one support appears to be outsourced. There are different Cisco badges, and they outsource level one support to other people before taking it over from level two. For one of our bank clients with a very premium contract and smart licensing, they provided better support. The level of support you receive depends on whether you are okay with partner-enabled support or if you want premium customer support. It is fair because it is very rare that your service will not be available. I rate them as seven because sometimes level one engagements take time to get those people to the right part of the issue, as they ask basic questions like tenant ID and continue with W-H questions, which takes longer.

The setup is very straightforward. You get assigned a tenant and log into it, then integrate it with your existing Identity and Access Management solutions. For a brownfield deployment, this adds complexity, whereas for a greenfield deployment, the process is simpler. For a greenfield setup, you just start creating identities and send out auto-enrollment emails to the users who need to be onboarded. You need to do some domain verification in the beginning. It is up and running in a matter of two to three hours. The way you integrate and migrate it definitely depends upon the complexity of the environment and enterprise. If you have 100 different identity stores in different regulatory regions and countries with different regulatory requirements, this definitely adds complexity. However, this is not unique to Cisco Duo but applies to any vendor. For my deployment, we were able to get it up and running in a matter of a few hours on day zero and then keep expanding it over the following days.

For one of my clients, the ROI was somewhere between 25 to 27 percent in year one. We had a lot of things planned for the next year, but that was taken over by D2 operations teams. Year one definitely yielded around 26 to 27 percent in savings. The cost of benefits from a better risk posture or no compromises is definitely very difficult to estimate because that is more about understanding probability, so I would not say those theoretical numbers are close to reality.

For a couple of clients, they were able to get good deals because they were already a Cisco shop in the past. Cisco Duo came in more as an additional feature, which was counted as a new feature purchase, and this brought down the cost that the client had to invest. Cisco is smart with bundling, as you get multiple tools from Cisco that come in as add-ons and you get very good pricing. For clients using on-premises Active Directory as a source of truth, we were able to move all of those to Cisco Duo, which is SaaS and cloud managed. You do not need to maintain virtual machines, expensive servers, or redundancies, which definitely brings cost savings. You are able to remove all of that additional expense, and you also do not need to manage those anymore, so all of that goes away. Ease  of management and lowering cost with regards to maintaining infrastructure are definite wins, though these are not unique to Cisco Duo but typical of SaaS-based Identity and Access Management solutions. All of these factors weigh in to give you a decent ROI. With regards to security, you are getting better security than traditional solutions, which is a win-win.

My overall experience with Cisco Duo comes from working on the product from 2019 through 2020 and on and off for around three and a half to four years total. I am a service provider for Cisco as an MSP. My role was a partner as part of a couple of our SGOs in Deloitte. We had an alliance partnership where we offered services, advised, implemented, and operated for clients. We also worked with Cisco to package different solutions and position them to clients after running assessments to improve their security posture.

Cisco Duo can be used for centralizing identity and access management across different business units and locations, integrating remote access VPN with identity systems, creating role-based access controls, implementing MFA and phishing resistant authentication, and conducting security assessments to identify gaps and improve security posture.

Some positive features about Cisco Duo include deep integration with other Cisco products, phishing resistant MFA with Talos Threat Intelligence enrichment, identity intelligence for behavioral analysis and access control, cloud-based SaaS delivery eliminating on-premises infrastructure costs, and stable performance with well-planned maintenance windows.

Cisco Duo has not been adopted by a very large set of enterprises compared to competitors like Okta and Azure Entra ID, which represents a significant area for improvement. The overall review rating I would give for Cisco Duo is seven.

Cisco Duo 's main use case is with Federal, specifically a version for the government, positioned side-by-side with Okta. Originally, it was implemented with the Department of Defense, which ran the traditional Oracle IAM . Someone convinced them that the Oracle IAM  was obsolete, so they decided to reverse engineer the entire system. The migration involved reverse engineering the Oracle IAM  into Cisco Duo  and Okta, transitioning from on-premises to the cloud while maintaining integration with Oracle Cloud  due to their heavy investment in Oracle Cloud  for EBS, HCM, and enterprise ERP  systems.

The best features of Cisco Duo include easy integration. I could do a lot of things with Cisco Duo comprehensively. Multiple types of MFA are available, and the fact that it passed the certification with the Department of Defense gave Cisco Duo an A+.

I use Cisco Duo's Advanced Identity Threat Detection and Response feature, which includes all the necessary counterparts. It has the intelligence to detect threats, performs risk assessment, and then provides a score to determine whether someone is legitimately attempting to sign in.

This feature has been helpful because it validates while maintaining trust. The trust but verify design principle is fundamental. Cisco Duo includes the Zero Trust Architecture, where everything lists a privilege, and from there, Privileged Access Management  applies. If you want to elevate someone and give them additional privileges, the system handles that process.

I have not had the chance to rate Cisco Duo's support because I pass my documentation to the group responsible for creating tickets, as being a contractor, I don't have the account permissions to create tickets myself. I document everything with screenshots and pass it along. Based on what I heard regarding their response, Cisco Duo's support is pretty good. They are responsive and accurate in their responses, and they do their homework. This is one thing I now observe as a stark contrast with Oracle, where the support experience is terrible. You need to create a ticket, and then I have to call back and create another ticket just to monitor the first ticket. With no responses on those two, I had to create a third ticket to monitor the second ticket. I created about 33 tickets on this IAM  thing because there was an intermediary, Accenture Federal. I created about 33 tickets just to monitor the previous tickets, and no resolution was given. I came up with my own solution.

I am not involved with Cisco Duo's pricing, so I am the person where they said, 'We bought this product, go ahead and do your magic.'

I was introduced to Cisco Duo when I worked for University of Massachusetts in 2012. I have had multiple projects since then because I have encountered clients with all kinds of IAM . One group does not want to give up their IAM  because it works well with their application.

Cisco Duo is stable and reliable in my opinion. The fact that it goes into production means it goes through the ATO process, where everybody tests it and different groups conduct their own testing. I have not encountered any issues unless we patch the environment. The only downtime I have encountered is during patching, but that is not due to Cisco Duo. That is part of the maintenance standard operating procedure.

Cisco Duo is pretty scalable.

Based on what I heard regarding their response, Cisco Duo's support is pretty good. They are responsive and accurate in their responses, and they do their homework.

The main differences between Cisco Duo and Okta for IAM solutions are that Okta does not have an exclusive product tagged as Federal. It depends on the person designing it. The way I made Okta comparable with Cisco Duo Federal is by attaching it to CAC, which is used by the military as military ID. That is the only way it becomes federal level because you are using another form of identification. With Cisco Duo, it is embedded within the system. However, somehow, the Department of Defense got sold on the idea that Okta is the way to go. Gradually, Cisco Duo is there because of Cisco. The name Cisco behind it makes it a really powerful product.

I have experience with Cisco Duo across different IGA and IAM security products including Oracle IAM, Okta, SailPoint, Ping, Cisco Duo, Active Directory, and Entra ID, which is Microsoft's offering.

My experience with Cisco Duo's strong security authentication system has been good. It is seamless and easy to integrate. It is flexible.

Cisco Duo's IAM is evolving because it now includes AI. I am not sure if I have fully used OAuth, the authorization component. I think it is there, but I just have not fully played with it. The OAuth, OpenID, and SAML are all present, but this IAM is evolving.

I have not had the chance to use Cisco Duo's conversational AI interface for administration tasks. Everything now is AI-enabled, but the government is very cautious about that. It is a switch that you can turn off and turn on if you want it.

The passwordless environment has been the subject of a huge debate about passwords. I even gave a presentation with the Department of Energy, and they did not like the way I presented it. I made a joke and said, 'With passwords, you need to extract the blood of the person you want to authenticate, aside from the password,' and they did not like that. They said it was too bloody. With passwordless authentication, FIDO 1, 2, and 3 are the direction everything is going. Everything is keys now, anywhere, and tokens. That is why Oracle IAM was dropped from the equation.

Cisco Duo is hybrid. First, they want to see it on-premises, and from there, it evolves because of the way things are deployed. They start with the application, the databases are on-premises, and then the applications are moved to the cloud. That becomes a hybrid situation, and then one by one, the databases are transported to the cloud.

When you work on government projects, everything is there with Cisco Duo. AWS , Azure , GCP, and Oracle FedRAMP are all available. It is multi-cloud.

I would rate this review a 9 overall.

I usually work with clients in the financial sector. Many of those clients need to meet certain security requirements that are mandated by their auditor or recommended by their auditor, which is dual multifactor authentication. That is usually the reason why they first look at Cisco Duo, and then I pitch Cisco Duo to those customers for authentication into most of their financial applications as well as VPN access.

It is very commonly used for VPN access.

I think seamless login, as well as less administrative overhead in terms of managing users and their login credentials and passwords, and tighter security are valuable.

The main thing is it helps the customers meet their security requirements.

Cisco Duo is very easy to deploy. The documentation is very thorough, which makes deployment straightforward.

The only area I could think of is support for more applications. Cisco Duo already covers a wide range of apps, especially the common ones, but there is always room to add more.

I have 27 years of experience in this field. I have been using Cisco Duo for two years.

Cisco Duo has excellent stability, as is usual with Cisco products.

I work for a company that is a Cisco Duo reseller, so scalability has not been an issue.

The customer service has been excellent.

I have never used a previous solution before Cisco Duo.

Since the company I work for is a Cisco Duo reseller, I did not need an external implementation team.

The return on investment is positive and is not a problem.

Compared to other vendors, Cisco Duo is on the pricey end. However, the other vendors do not have the wide range of features that Cisco Duo offers.

There are no alternate solutions that I can think of.