Cisco Duo Reviews

My main use for Cisco Duo is for authentication. If Cisco Duo were removed, we would have to find another authentication method. As my organization adopts and deploys AI agents, we are not doing that yet with agentic IAM to ensure these non-human identities are secure, and the role Cisco Duo plays in that strategy is not defined. Cisco Duo fits into my broader security environment as an added security layer for our clients. Looking back, Cisco Duo has helped me evolve my IAM strategy from simple authentication to a more comprehensive identity security platform by providing two-factor authentication for our clients' security needs. When evaluating my identity strategy, I was looking for a standalone authentication system to be able to be implemented on a per-client basis.

The features of Cisco Duo that I like the most are not my field of expertise. Examples of how these features benefited my organization include providing us with additional robustness in our security products for our customers. Cisco Duo has improved my operational efficiency and reduced costs by better managing authentication for our clients and helping to reduce potential compromises and brute force attacks.

Cisco Duo can be improved, but additional features that should be included in the next release are not my area of responsibility.

I have been using Cisco Duo for six years.

The stability and reliability of Cisco Duo are acceptable. We have had a few incidents and bugs related to Cisco Duo that caused some impact, but nothing out of the ordinary.

Cisco Duo scales very well with the growing needs of my organization. I have expanded usage of Cisco Duo and the process was very smooth. We have continually expanded it and have resold it to clients for the last six years.

I would evaluate customer service and technical support on a scale from one to ten as a ten because Cisco does a great job supporting their services.

Prior to adopting Cisco Duo, we were not using another solution to address similar needs.

My experience with the deployment of Cisco Duo was good. Our administrators were trained on the product prior to deploying it, and we had no issues. We did not face any challenges during deployment, and the entire process went very well.

I have seen a return on investment with Cisco Duo.

The steps my organization has taken to become more resistant to phishing attacks and the contribution of Cisco Duo's broader security approach are not my area of responsibility. The types of phishing or credential-based attacks I was concerned about before implementing Cisco Duo and how those threats have evolved are not my area either. Cisco Duo's visibility into identity-based risks has not improved my ability to manage the security of both human users and non-human users' identities across my environment because it is not my area of expertise. Key capabilities beyond MFA led to my choice of Cisco Duo as my primary identity security partner are not applicable. Data points or examples that I have are not available. I chose Cisco security because it offers the best unified partner solutions. I gave this review a rating of ten.

The main use case for Cisco Duo is extra authentication into the network.

The feature that I appreciate the most about Cisco Duo is that it goes to my cell phone.

Cisco Duo's trusted endpoint device capabilities have helped improve my organization's security policies by preventing unauthorized access from unknown devices quite a bit.

If I could improve Cisco Duo, I would suggest providing some notification back that the Cisco Duo system was not able to reach the remote device, because I was left in a situation where I did not know if it was actually my cell phone or something was wrong with Cisco Duo.

We have been using Cisco Duo for three years.

I would assess the stability and reliability of Cisco Duo and note that the issues I have experienced were not from Cisco Duo, but from cellular devices. There have been instances where the Cisco Duo push took too long to come to my cell phone. I do not know if that is the carrier involvement, but there are times where I am waiting for the push and I never receive it. It appears to be a cell phone issue; I may be in a hotspot or dead spot and it is hard to tell.

I have not had any issues with Cisco Duo's customer service and tech support. I would give Cisco Duo a 10 out of 10 for customer service.

Before Cisco Duo, I used some type of grid chart.

I would describe my experience with deploying Cisco Duo as very easy. I really do not think we had any challenges other than the fact that notification of teams that it was coming probably could have been better, but that was more of an internal thing. It happened so fast and with ease that it was very quick.

Those options were not looked at from my team when selecting Cisco Duo. It was our cybersecurity team that evaluated those options, so the network team did not really have a lot of involvement in exploring options.

I use Cisco Duo's adaptive authentication feature. From my perspective on the network side, I do not think Cisco Duo's dashboards really apply to me; that is something that our security side handles. I have not used Cisco Duo's push notification method on my side, but I know there are other teams that have, and they definitely prefer it. Right now, I do not think there is anything about Cisco Duo that I would improve; I have been happy with everything so far. My advice for organizations considering Cisco Duo is to implement the service quickly. I would rate this review a 9 out of 10.

My main use case for Cisco Duo is just authentication.

The features of Cisco Duo that I like the most are all of the above, especially the multifactor authentication that is very easy to use now. The ease of use and setting up users are excellent. It integrates well with everything.

Cisco Duo's trusted endpoint device capabilities have improved our organization's security policies quite well. The second tier of MFA is valuable.

Cisco Duo has improved the authentication times across the platforms as it is easy to use. One push of a button is all that is required. You do not have to memorize a code for thirty seconds.

Some examples of how Cisco Duo's features have benefited my organization include overall security. People take the laptops home and use VPN, so we can see where they try to log in and improve security. We are able to point multiple devices, switches, routers, firewalls, and everything to one offline location. Everything points back to one container.

I think Cisco Duo can be improved. Perhaps making it cheaper would be an improvement. Pricing is always a consideration.

I have been using Cisco Duo for two years, or perhaps we just got it recently.

I would assess the stability and reliability of Cisco Duo as strong, as I am not aware of any downtime, crashes, or performance issues.

Cisco Duo scales with the growing needs of my organization quite well. I believe it is per license basis.

I have expanded usage. We did a small sample size and then we are slowly rolling out to the whole organization.

The process has been pretty smooth.

I would evaluate my customer service and technical support for Cisco Duo as excellent since I have never needed to deal with them before, which is a positive thing.

On a scale from one being the worst to ten being the best, I would rate the customer service and technical support overall as ten out of ten. I have heard of no issues.

Before selecting Cisco Duo, we had Cisco AnyConnect. It has been there since I have been here. This was implemented when I first got to my position, so I am not sure what we used before.

Prior to adopting Cisco Duo, I was not using another solution to address similar needs that I am aware of.

I would describe my experience with deploying Cisco Duo as straightforward. We deploy switches and routers in our networking environment, and it is very easy. You just point TACACS to it and it pushes out very easily. We have not had any issues with deployment or conflicts compared to anything else. There have been no issues with device management.

I have seen a return on investment with Cisco Duo.

The advice I would give to another organization considering using Cisco Duo is to start small and then scale out. Make sure you have all the kinks and all the bugs settled within ten to one hundred users before going to a grand scale. I would rate this product overall as ten out of ten.

My main use case with Cisco Duo is for two-factor authentication. I need Cisco Duo authentication in my company because I have no different option to use a different solution not related to Cisco due to a limitation of a product like Cisco ISE that will not be able to use a different mechanism than Cisco Duo authenticator. I have to use Cisco Duo authentication to have two-factor authentication and fulfill security requirements in the company.

The feature I like the most about Cisco Duo is two-factor authentication. Cisco Duo helps me to defend against phishing attacks and provides security for my organization.

I really have no idea how Cisco Duo can be improved. I do not see any features that I would like to have that are not currently implemented.

I have been using Cisco Duo for about half a year.

I have not noticed any stability or reliability issues such as downtime or crashes.

I think Cisco Duo will scale with the growing needs of the organization. It will be growing because every company and every regulation requires two-factor authentication, and we have to use it by one vendor or another. I think a solution such as that will be growing in the future.

I mainly used the Microsoft solution because we have merged a lot of products with Microsoft, and using DevOps, Azure, and other services is naturally how we use Microsoft authentication for many things. However, if we cannot do it in some scope, we have to find out how to do it in a specific section.

With the deployment of Cisco Duo, I can do it with instructions. I am not an expert, but I am something between beginner and intermediate.

I cannot say that I have seen a return on investment from having Cisco Duo. I have experienced only a security benefit.

My experience with the pricing and licensing and setup costs is that I think it is fair because licensing depends on the user that uses it and consumes those tokens.

I had to reduce a lot of Microsoft Azure Authenticator, but for some reason, it is not supported in some products of Cisco. We have to divide it so that Cisco Duo also covers those needs.

I do not use Cisco Identity Intelligence. I have not noticed any increase in phishing attacks recently, but I work in a financial company where the security is critical. If something can happen one time per 25 years, it is very risky and has to be mitigated somehow. I have implemented Cisco Duo end-to-end phishing resistance with proximity verification for both. I did deploy Cisco Duo Directory to manage the user identity and am using it as a standalone identity provider. I do not think I discovered any new functionalities that I did not think of in the beginning. I did not really face any challenges doing that. I would rate this review a 10 out of 10.

Cisco Duo is for multi-factor authentication for all of our users and securing our assets off-campus.

Cisco Duo has benefited our company overall by giving us the ability to have multi-factor authentication. At the time, we didn't have any other in-house options. While going through the process of identifying a vendor, Cisco Duo was by far the cream of the crop, so we went that direction, and we've been there ever since.

The Verified Duo Push feature is valuable. It gives an extra level of security beyond just the regular push. Before that came out, we had a few instances of people getting compromised, pushing the button because they thought it was something else they were doing, and it turned out to be an attacker compromising their account. We were able to enable that pretty much as soon as it went into production, which drastically cut down on any issues. 

It's been pretty easy. There haven't been too many challenges. It does what it says it does. It's easy. It's straightforward. It's not a hard process to do anything with it. Even though we don't take a lot of advantage of it, there are always new features that are coming out. It shows that Cisco puts time, effort, and development into it.

I would appreciate seeing Cisco Duo improved with a tighter integration with Active Directory to secure not just Remote Desktop to a server, but all the remote levels of connection that you can make to a server. 

Other than that, there can be a better way to onboard users who don't want to use a phone, but that's stretching it because we can do a token or order Cisco Duo tokens, or do FIDO keys.

I have been using Cisco Duo for 10 years.

The problems we've had with Cisco Duo have been very easy to resolve, and the team has been very helpful in providing solutions. It's not one that we've had a lot of challenges with. A couple of times, our Cisco Duo region might have had an issue, but there was very clear communication, and it was resolved pretty quickly. It's been great, and I don't have a lot to say because there haven't been many problems.

Cisco Duo has scaled great with the growing needs of my company. It scales easily because it is just tied into our identity provider, and it grows along with that. I don't have a lot of specific examples because it's just something that's there. It works, it's reliable, and I don't have to think about it too much.

Their team has been very helpful in providing solutions. I would rate the technical service and customer support of Cisco Duo a ten out of ten.

Positive

It was easy. The difficult part was just the culture shift and making people understand why multifactor authentication was important and why we were using Cisco Duo. Even if you're a retired faculty member who doesn't do anything, you still need to protect your account because it's a doorway into our system. We need to make sure it's secured. Once we got through those hurdles and it was adopted, the problems were few and far between.

The implementation involved using Cisco Duo services, specifically the concierge service for onboarding, which was excellent. They provided a lot of information and templates for sending out registrations and notifications of what we were doing. They walked us through any technical challenges, which I don't remember having, so it was all a very smooth and good experience.

From my point of view, the biggest return on investment when using Cisco Duo is the security and the ease of setting it up. It's easy to enroll, the email goes out, and the user can just download the app and set it up. We're not having to provision tokens and email them out or make people come to campus and stand in line to register a device.

My experience with the pricing, setup cost, and licensing of Cisco Duo has been great. We've been there for 10 years. While we haven't gone through the setup part for a while, licensing is straightforward and convenient for higher education because student populations are included. So, we don't have to pay extra for it. We just pay for our knowledge workers, which has been great, and the cost is reasonable.

While using Cisco Duo, we have looked at Microsoft Entra ID because it includes MFA and could probably do the bulk of what we do. However, when we look at it, it doesn't do everything fully, so we still have to keep Cisco Duo. It doesn't make sense to have half our users use that and the other people use Cisco Duo, so we just keep it all in one and use Cisco Duo.

Cisco Duo's reliability is definitely better. The app experience is definitely better. Our test users have had a lot of challenges with Entra ID that our Duo users don't have.

Other than the verified push, my company has not really started using any new features or functionalities in Cisco Duo recently, but we are looking at going to a more zero-trust type of setup. We've been looking at how to leverage Cisco Duo better without hugely increasing the expense of our authentication systems. Currently, we have it integrated with Entra ID and our Active Directory environment. We are looking at how we can expand that out and improve our security on campus.

We have been with various vendors for a complete passwordless environment, and we've tried doing it with Entra ID but have run into challenges with some vendors that still require a password in their SAML authentications. I haven't really validated the Cisco Duo portion of it yet, and I'm not sure what all that entails at this point. I know it can be done, but we haven't implemented it yet.

I would rate Cisco Duo a ten out of ten. 

The main use case for Cisco Duo is MFA, which means multifactor authentication using the app and using keys like YubiKeys for various devices, such as RDP and remote access, but I would say remote access is the most prominent use case.

Right now, the feature I appreciate most about Cisco Duo is the Duo Directory, which is exciting because it became an IDP.

It is exciting that with Cisco Duo, I can offload guest users and contractors to Duo, so they do not have to exist in the customer environment from their AD, which is a nice way to accommodate guests and contractors needing access to applications.

I express how I appreciate Cisco Identity Intelligence to customers using the Duo Advantage license and always try to push them to at least take a look because it is essentially free with the Duo product.

I have multiple MFA vendors in our portfolio, and I try to position Cisco Duo because I think it is a really good product, but we also try to position other solutions depending on what the customer wants and where they think we can go together.

I deployed Duo Directory to manage user identities, and I think it is great because it is never a standalone provider; it always acts as an additional provider or broker functionality to be the front door and decide to go this way or go to the other IDP.

Once Cisco Duo is set up and running, it just keeps running.

I think Cisco Duo can be improved with more YubiKey support with all applications, especially for Windows login.

I have been using Cisco Duo for three to four years, since the beginning of 2020.

I did not notice any problem with stability and reliability; it was always available with not much downtime needed.

Sometimes if I have problems, I obviously have to create a TAC case to ask for help, but most of the time, I would say it is very stable.

I think Cisco Duo is scalable for organizational growth, as we have some customers using it who then onboarded new users and even bought companies and onboarded them; it is highly flexible and I did not feel any slowdown anywhere.

The experience of deploying Cisco Duo is great; it is fast and not too complex in my opinion, as you can integrate basically anything into Duo, so I would say the experience is overall very great as an administrator.

I think Cisco Duo helped reduce the overall authentication-related cost for the company indirectly, as there is less work to do for the admins, because once it is set up, users understand the app, know how to use it, and rarely have problems, so if new devices need registering, they can do it themselves, depending on the setup.

The pricing for Cisco Duo is kind of okay, but most of the time, your competitor is someone like Microsoft who gives it out for free with their offering, making it tough to argue with customers why they should spend additional dollars to also get Duo to improve their setup, but I think the pricing is fair.

I am mostly part of the deployment and with the customers; I am not on the operational side of things, so I cannot really share about phishing attacks, but I mean, Cisco Duo allows phishing-resistant MFA, which is why I try to push my customers to use it, so I would argue, hopefully not.

That is why I try to push my customers to actually use proximity verification and use passkeys to strengthen security, which was mentioned in my previous answer.

I think there is a return on investment for the support team, where they can help validate customer requests and also through self-service portals, but I do not have any numbers regarding return on investment.

I would give Cisco Duo as a solution a rating of 10 because it is great.

Our main use cases for Cisco Duo are to support all employees that need to connect remotely, which is the primary case we're using, and we also use it for some technical parts, like connecting our Meraki to Cisco Duo for the IT.

What I appreciate most about Cisco Duo is how simple it is to use; you connect it to the email address and phone number, and you are able to push everything to the client. You can watch the log for a quick response to see if it's working or not, and check what went wrong in the log during the morning or something, and even push something to everyone if needed, so there are many valuable aspects which is very good.

The benefits of Cisco Duo for my company include how easy and simple it is to use; Cisco Duo is so easy to maintain and everything grows quickly with the number of users you add into it. You can even add new applications for verification, and it's policy in our company to have two-factor authentication, which we use in combination with that.

I cannot think of a specific feature that should be focused on for improvement, but perhaps addressing the trouble we have when people are changing phones would help. When a new phone is obtained, and Cisco Duo needs to be installed, it is easy to go into Cisco Duo and find the user to push verification, so perhaps doing this through Active Directory could make it easier, but that also raises questions about security.

I have been using Cisco Duo for approximately four years.

I would describe the stability and reliability of Cisco Duo as excellent because we almost never have troubles with it; the issues we face are with other systems, not Cisco Duo.

Cisco Duo scales very well with the growing needs of my company; during COVID, when we had a higher number of users, there were no problems at all.

I would describe my experience with the customer service and technical support of Cisco Duo as excellent service, and I could totally recommend using Cisco Duo, so it's 100%.

I would rate the customer service and technical support of Cisco Duo a 10, for sure.

Before choosing Cisco Duo, we considered Authenticator, which is similar, but I found Cisco Duo easier to implement because we have everything from Cisco, including firewalls and other essential technologies, making it the best choice for our environment.

The deployment process for Cisco Duo is easygoing; I would say it's very easygoing.

I think it took about two days to implement Cisco Duo; as I mentioned, if you connect it to Active Directory, it's straightforward, especially the first time, as you pick everything up from Active Directory and only need to go into Cisco Duo later when people change phones or something similar, requiring verification to see how many users are pending or have not used it.

The biggest return on investment for me when using Cisco Duo is security; that's the main point.

Cisco Duo has helped my company reduce its overall authentication-related costs.

I cannot provide an approximate percentage of how much it has helped reduce because, as I mentioned, if people don't use it, they don't get access.

I think the pricing of Cisco Duo is fair because we hired a number of users during COVID when we had many people working remotely, and the costs increased; if I remember correctly, Cisco offered something during COVID that gave us a lower price, so I find the pricing fair.

We thought about Authenticator, and our choice ultimately was Cisco Duo.

My advice to other companies considering Cisco Duo is not to wait; start using it and implementing it. I would rate this review a 10.

Our main use cases for Cisco Duo are that we use it for all MFA with ISE for all of our service provider devices, all the servers, and related equipment.

Duo with ISE features benefit my company by making logins more secure and simpler. Everything is in one box, so we don't have multiple servers or multiple account on those servers for different device types. 

The feature of Cisco Duo that I prefer the most is centralized authentication for both TACACS and RADIUS. 

My ability to decrease time while using Cisco Duo varies. We don't change up people frequently, but one person would take me up to an hour out of my day to onboard or offboard. If we onboard 10 people I could spend my entire day giving access. 

Possible an integration with ISE where the DUIO proxy and DUO configuration can be done on ISE instead of separate portals.

I have been using Cisco Duo for five years now.

Regarding the stability and reliability of the platform, there have been issues. Cisco Duo has their issues, and they are effective about notifications saying they're having login issues or push notification issues; none of it has really affected me. They have backups, and I haven't noticed any issues with them.

Regarding its scalability, I haven't hit any limits yet, and I've got 1,000 users in there with no issues. I just go to my sales partner and request more licenses, and that's it. Since it's a cloud solution, I don't have to worry about it.

I never had a chance to experience anything with their customer service and technical support bsince I never had to reach out to them for anything.

Positive

We did not use or consider other solutions that do the same that Cisco Duo does. We went straight to Duo since we used it in conjunction with ISE.

The deployment of Cisco Duo is very simple. It's not hard at all. You just point your device to it, go into the portal and register, and you're done. There's nothing complex about it.

For me, the biggest return on investment when using Cisco Duo is my time. With multiple servers and different types of servers, if someone is onboarded or offboarded or they forget their password, I would have to change it in ten different places or more. Now I don't have to do that; I just do it in one place, and I'm done, so that helps.

My experience with the pricing, the setup costs, and the licensing of the solution is that it's cheap compared to running multiple other servers to do the same job. 

There aren't any new features or functionalities in Cisco Duo that my company has started using recently; we use it primarily for the authentication portion. There are other features we can use, yet we haven't turned those options on yet, so that's more a matter of time than anything.

We have many different vendors and types of devices that we require MFA for login.  That said, Duo helps bring all of those accounts into one system, in conjunction with ISE, you have one username, one password, and you access all the devices instead of having every device have its own credentials. It lowers the number of passwords you need to have.

Cisco Duo is on the right track for improvement. A lot of their devices already integrate with it now. They keep adding features for more devices that interact natively with it, instead of having to have a third-party server to reach out to Duo.

I would rate Cisco Duo overall about an eight out of ten; it's a strong product.

The major use case for Cisco Duo is remote access VPN, which I believe is the widespread solution for remote access. I use it in combination with Cisco AnyConnect, Cisco Firepower, and Cisco Duo as an MFA solution.

Considering the biggest advantage in the product and personal preferences, simple integration is key. Cisco Duo works within a huge Cisco security ecosystem and the integration is straightforward. That is the first big advantage. As a customer, it is really simple to use because the GUI is intuitive and the application for smartphones is straightforward. Daily-based activity is also simple, with just a quick push notification.

Regarding the ease of the security authentication system, it is quite simple. You are just receiving a push notification or a one-time password.

The assessment feature, also called posture, is what I find good. It performs checks on cell phones for new updates, patches, and so on. I think that is an interesting solution.

Cisco Duo is a fully cloud-based solution. It would be beneficial if Cisco provided a fully on-premise solution. I have discussed this with the local Cisco office in Kyiv regarding any possibility to deploy on-premise, but as I understand, there are technical issues or technical aspects preventing them from deploying a full on-premise solution. The only disadvantage is that it is fully cloud-based.

When considering if additional features should be added in the future or if something is missing now, I am fully satisfied at present.

I started using Cisco Duo approximately five or six years ago, since Cisco announced its MFA product. I started using Cisco Duo specifically for remote access VPN solutions and related products.

Regarding stability and possible glitches or latency problems, I have never experienced any issues.

Regarding scalability and whether it is easy to scale or any limits faced, I have not encountered any limits in our deployment.

Cisco technical support is absolutely helpful because I have very good communication with the local Cisco office in Ukraine. The first line of support, Cisco TAC, is absolutely good with no problems or issues. In the case of emergency situations, such as P1 cases, I have the ability to contact our local colleagues in the Kyiv office to escalate our issues. Support from Cisco is absolutely good with no issues or problems.

I have used solutions similar to Cisco Duo.

Since the product is only deployed on the cloud, installation is really easy. It is really easy to deploy. In a few hours, you will have access to the cloud GUI, and a few hours are needed to complete the integration process. It is absolutely easy.

Regarding Cisco Duo's affordability for the Ukrainian market, I think it is affordable. It depends on an installation base. For a medium and mid-range market, I think it is a fully affordable price when comparing with other products and solutions.

A huge competitor in our market, especially in the Ukrainian market, is an HID product. The biggest difference between Cisco Duo and competitors is that they have an on-premise solution. That is the only difference, I believe.

Regarding the impression of Cisco Duo's Identity Intelligence capability, I do not have much experience with the capability at this time, but it provides really good visibility for information purposes. Unfortunately, I do not have enough experience with the capability to comment further.

Regarding whether a complete passwordless environment is beneficial, the major point is that you do not need to track all passwords. You need to track different passwords for different applications and solutions. You do not need to use third-party password management tools. It is really simple to provide and obtain secure access where you need it. That is the most advantageous feature of the passwordless solution.

If asked to subjectively rate support from zero to ten points, I would give it eight or nine points.

My overall rating of Cisco Duo on a scale from zero to ten is 8.5, as it is close to nine.

My main use cases for Cisco Duo are authentication to different services.

What I like the most about Cisco Duo is that whenever I get a new phone, all of it transfers to the new phone, while Microsoft Authenticator does not; I have to do each one one by one.

An example of how these features benefit my organization is that we do it for anybody that needs to access the VPN, including student logins at some different schools, so it just makes authentication more secure.

To become more resistant to phishing attacks, we use Cisco Duo as part of our network access control so that anytime students need to access certain things or teachers' VPN connections, the same for businesses, we secure the VPN that way. We know who's logging in, and we put an extra layer of authentication behind it.

Cisco Duo fits into my broader security environment as a kind of first layer, mainly for VPNs. As I said, it adds that extra layer of authentication after someone authenticates.

Cisco Duo's visibility into identity-based risk has improved my ability to manage the security of both human and non-human users' identities across my environment because we see log in attempts, so we can see who's logging into the network through the VPN at certain times, giving us another layer of visibility on who's on the network.

The way Cisco Duo can be improved, including features that should be included in the next release, is something I don't know off the top of my head; I would need to go back and look at our customers' wants and what they would like to see implemented.

I have probably been using Cisco Duo the entire time.

I assess the stability and reliability of Cisco Duo by noting that the only time we experienced an issue was when doing RADIUS authentication, and we had to tweak the timer to allow time for Cisco Duo authentication to take place before the RADIUS request was denied.

Cisco Duo scales well with the growing needs of my organization, being easy to manage as long as we have the Cisco Duo licenses to support the growing user count, and it's as simple as just provisioning them a Cisco Duo license.

I have expanded usage, and the process of expansion was fairly simple.

On a scale from one being the worst to ten being the best, I would rate my customer service and technical support experience as a seven.

I would give them a seven because they are readily available; we haven't had to reach out to support a whole lot, but I would say maybe just more on the technical side, getting those initial passes through the tiers to the tier that we need to support us.

Prior to adopting Cisco Duo, I was using Microsoft Authenticator in many environments and some other authenticator platforms.

What considered the change to Cisco Duo was cost for some and then just overall compatibility with the equipment they had.

My experience with the deployment was easy with no real issues.

Before selecting Cisco Duo, the other solutions I considered were mostly Microsoft Authenticator if their capability to support it was available.

What stood out in the evaluation process, both positive and negative, when comparing options was integration ability and ease of use.

When evaluating my identity strategy, I was looking for a comprehensive identity security platform rather than a standalone MFA tool, since I am an MSP servicing multiple clients, and I prefer a solution that integrates with many different technologies as most clients have a hodgepodge of equipment.

Cisco Duo's broader IAM capabilities meet those needs by just adding that extra layer of security, which is always important.

I am using it as an added security layer that integrates with other security products and tools that I may have in my stack.

The key capabilities beyond the MFA that led me to choose Cisco Duo as my primary identity security partner included MFA as the main one.

Cisco Duo has improved my operational efficiency to reduce costs in areas like authentication, IT support, and security operations by just securing the environment. It's that extra layer; after putting MFA behind it with Cisco Duo, there's now that extra layer we can fall back on.

Those threats have evolved in ways that I don't even know how to start narrowing it down; they evolve every day, and so it's just trying to keep the network as secure with multiple layers of authentication on it as much as we can put it on.

Looking back, Cisco Duo helps me evolve my IAM strategy from simple authentication to a more comprehensive identity security platform by providing another level of security. It puts another layer on everybody's accounts, so if an account is compromised, there's still that extra layer of authentication needed to get through.

If Cisco Duo was removed, the impact on my ability to manage and secure access across my entire identity ecosystem would mean that, for some of the school systems that we support, we would need to find a different solution, probably Microsoft Authenticator if they have the infrastructure for it, but we would probably be scrambling to get some different authentication sources in.

My advice to another organization considering using Cisco Duo is to take into account the licensing, ensuring that your environment supports it, and looking at making sure it can integrate with the different equipment you have in your environment. I would rate this product an eight overall.