My main use cases for Cisco Duo are two-factor authentication and single sign-on for different solutions.
The feature I like the most about Cisco Duo is the dashboard to have everything in one single place and manage multiple customers and multiple tenants simultaneously.
Cisco Duo benefits my organization because we do not have too many logins since everything is in one place and we can use Cisco Duo for VPN, applications, and cloud solutions. This is a main benefit and the core purpose of the product that we are utilizing.
I think Cisco Duo can be improved. I found the onboarding was very difficult, even for engineers who have been using similar solutions before. For our specific implementation, we needed to have multiple groups, multiple companies, and multiple third parties, and I felt that the examples and material provided were insufficiently detailed. The onboarding videos, materials, how-to guides, and documentation should be improved dramatically.
I have been using Cisco Duo for approximately three years.
I did not notice any downtime or crashes with Cisco Duo. We focused on making modifications and changes only during maintenance windows, and afterwards in production, we did not have any downtime.
Cisco Duo's scalability works well with the growth of our company and does not seem to have a limit. We could add as many users and as many sites as needed, so scalability is not an issue.
Before implementing Cisco Duo for this particular customer, I did not consider another solution. However, for other customers, we also use some open-source solutions and cloud providers, which unfortunately seem to be winning over Cisco Duo.
I cannot say I have seen a clear return on investment. However, as I was only the integrator, it is difficult for me to make an estimation on the customer's actual ROI. That said, considering that they did not have any more attacks, it is probably positive, but I am not able to fully evaluate that.
My experience with pricing, setup cost, and licensing for Cisco Duo is that it is not an expensive product. The issue was that we had a customer migrate away because they moved to one of the cloud providers for identity management as well. The difference in cost to upgrade to directory services on that platform was cheaper than having Cisco Duo. However, generally, if a customer is not tied to a specific cloud vendor, then the pricing is acceptable.
I do not recall seeing Cisco Identity Intelligence or using it.
I have noticed an increase in phishing attacks recently, and this was exactly the reason one of our customers asked us to implement Cisco Duo because they were attacked before and lost quite a bit of money. After that incident, we deployed Cisco Duo for them. While using Cisco Duo, we did not have any issues regarding other attacks.
When implementing Cisco Duo, I implemented end-to-end phishing resistance with the proximity verification as the full solution.
I deployed Cisco Duo Directory to manage user identity.
I am using it as an identity broker because we were not integrating to the customer's Active Directory. It was actually functioning as an identity proxy rather than as a directory per se.
The organization's overall cost for authentication was higher, but the indirect cost of being attacked and losing data is significantly greater.
I discovered new benefits after initial implementation when we started with basic VPN authentication and then developed many other flows based on that. We learned that there were not enough examples or documentation available so we could start from the beginning knowing everything about the product.
The deployment experience was complicated as it was a trial and error process. We had multiple existing systems, and for each system we wanted to integrate with Cisco Duo, the approach was different. One was connecting directly, one was using the API, one was using SAML, and one was using directory services, making the process quite challenging.
I would rate this review an eight out of ten.