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I am an IT system support person, and my use cases with Cisco Duo started out with helping clients at my firm and the firms my contracting agencies had by teaching them how to set up Cisco Duo and understand how to use it. Eventually, some of the systems I have access to on my own, usually the corporate systems and employee portals, were Cisco Duo-protected. It has been a split between using Cisco Duo and Microsoft Authenticator, depending on how the MFA has been set up. I started out as IT support, helping people install Cisco Duo on their Android and Apple devices, and I believe they actually had a computer client. Eventually, I had to use it in my own work to authenticate and gain access to the systems I support. Moreover, I have seen a lot of it used to access employee portals, either by end-user employees or my own employee portals.

My last access to Cisco Duo involved helping people either activate their Cisco Duo accounts on their individual Apple or Android devices, or if they were locked out, unlock their accounts or move them over to a new device.

The features I use in Cisco Duo include Duo Pushes to confirm my identity to the device, and eventually as MFA security was increased, I actually had to use exchange passcodes. Sometimes, I have to go into the site and get into Cisco Duo to retrieve the passcode, and many of them have been two-factor, where the sites send a passcode that I have to enter into Cisco Duo. It has been more of the latter.

I have not seen issues with lagging or crashing on Cisco Duo's end; it was usually on the client end, often because someone set up a bad upgrade or there were connection issues with the Cisco Duo cloud through the administrative site.

As support, I do not find it an issue with Cisco Duo product itself; it is more an issue of organization administration. Often, people do not receive expiration messages, and sometimes, for security reasons, accounts get disabled without notifying the end user, so they mistakenly think something has gone wrong when it really just needs to be re-enabled on the external system. It is primarily an issue on the administrative side of the firm I am working for.

I am familiar with Cisco Duo and have probably been using it since around 2020.

Cisco Duo seems very scalable. In my experience, I started with a small-medium business, and in my last contracting position, it was a large one for a major worldwide airline that had hundreds of thousands of devices that could use Cisco Duo, and it scaled very well. The administrative site was also very easy to navigate for locating people and devices. I also have a background in computer asset management, so I have the skill set to locate device records easily.

In terms of quality and speed of support for Cisco Duo, I find it just as fine as any other Cisco product. It is simpler at the endpoint; there is much less involved in calling technical support to resolve issues compared to other Cisco products. I have also dealt with firewalls and VPNs, and I can say that Cisco Duo administration is much less involved than other Cisco areas. I would rate support for Cisco Duo a 10, as I have never had a negative experience.

Positive

My experience with MFA is primarily Cisco Duo and Microsoft Authenticator, and I have used them both similarly, either as pushes for allow or deny or as stronger MFA requirements such as exchanging passcodes. From my experience, Cisco Duo seems a lot easier to install and operate. In helping add accounts to either my devices or to the devices of the people I am supporting, both systems work well. I can get passcodes or utilize QR codes. One thing I noticed about my current firm is their initial hesitation to consider QR code exchange secure, but eventually, it was re-enabled to reduce support times. As an administrator, I have done both, pushing activation to pre-installed devices already registered to a system or actually sending people a QR code to their email, and both methods worked fine with personal and corporate email.

The setup of Cisco Duo is easy. Most of the time, the setup took me walking the end user through the installation over the phone, but if they understood how to get to their App Store or Play Store, it takes probably under two minutes. Most of it depends on wide area network or internet speed; activating directly on a client device versus sending an activation email makes a difference. If it is all set up and requires only sending an activation code message, it is about a minute. Cisco Duo installs very quickly on Android and Apple devices, provided the Wi-Fi connection is good.

From what I was involved in with Cisco Duo, we actually conducted Cisco Duo pushes through the management systems, enabling that through MDMs, the Bomgar. I found it pretty easy to grab the latest version of the Cisco Duo installer to update the packages on our management systems. I do not remember having any problems; it is one of the easier applets to package or to already find packaged.

I am currently between jobs or contracts, but I believe for the MFA administrator, it would help if they set up the filters for gathering the data. Cisco Duo seems very scalable. In my experience, I started with a small-medium business, and in my last contracting position, it was a large one for a major worldwide airline that had hundreds of thousands of devices that could use Cisco Duo, and it scaled very well. The administrative site was also very easy to navigate for locating people and devices. I also have a background in computer asset management, so I have the skill set to locate device records easily. I have given this review an overall rating of 10.

For primary purposes, I am using Cisco Duo as an office gateway and Wi-Fi solution.

My experience with Cisco Duo's strong security authentication system has benefited my organization; it is quite simple. It helps to manage potential threats because there are many things; if you have connected any network equipment and someone has used any third-party equipment, it will alert immediately, detecting many things which are bypassing the network equipment very well.

There is much that is helpful in having a complete passwordless environment with Cisco Duo; previously, we had a lot of password handling and saving, with people forgetting passwords, but now we do not face those problems anymore.

To improve Cisco Duo, we have some third-party hardware, and for integrations with that, we need more user-friendly integrations since third-party integration can present a lot of compatibility issues with legacy products.

In terms of deployment, Cisco Duo requires some improvement.

I have been working with Cisco Duo for the past two to three years.

Stability is one thing, and it is very stable.

We do not have any scalability issues because we only have an alerting system; we do not have any AI integrations at this time.

It takes two months to deploy the product because we have many different locations, almost 15 countries.

I would rate the technical support of Cisco as seven.

For security, we use only Cisco at this time.

Deployment of Cisco Duo was, at the beginning, a little bit tricky with the designing and all the considerations, then after that, it is very convenient to handle.

For a non-prepared, non-technical user, it could be tricky and quite complex. The implementation part is not simple as it requires many things to be taken care of before it is a stable solution.

For the part of the deployment, we hired a third-party vendor who implemented and trained us, and now we are handling that.

It is beneficial in terms of finance to use Cisco Duo with some return on investment and cost reductions in the long run.

It is a little bit expensive, but with security, we cannot compromise on it.

I have not thought of some alternatives or of switching to some other products.

I do make use of advanced identity threat detection and response features.

I am not much of a user, but we have a team to handle those things, which are the advantages of Cisco Duo.

In the past one year, we have not upgraded to any new features.

I am not much aware about Cisco Identity Intelligence, but my team looks at those things; I have very little information on that.

My overall rating for this product is seven.