“Duo &” - The Power of Great Combinations
My History
When I started my career at Duo back in 2015, I was amazed how the product disrupted the strong authentication marketplace. My main job was to help prospects test out a modern, future-proof cloud authentication technology. Cloud security was a scary term back then, and the quickest way to allay those fears was to engage in a proof-of-concept (POC).
My team’s POC high water mark was nine applications integrated in six hours! This feat occurred at a Kansas City healthcare organization. The team presented our hard work the next day during a 45-minute executive overview. The end users were and still are medical professionals (not an easy audience to satisfy). After rollout, the Duo team was pleased when we heard back from the chief medical officer. His direct quote was, “Duo was not as frustrating as I thought it would be.” The quote was about the highest praise a technology could receive from a practitioner. From then on, I was a Duonaut for life.
Back to Basics
Today things have changed and they haven’t. Security professionals get bombarded with the promise of passwordless, OAuth, machine-learning/AI, zero trust, the proliferation of data and its location and on and on. During the past few months, I have seen many green-lit projects (see above) get put on the back burner. Companies had to get thousands of employees the ability to work from home securely, in some cases within a week. It made me stop and think about one of the original values of Duo. I will address one of the primary value drivers of the Duo.
Duos & Duo
The ampersand holds a special place in popular culture.
Peanut Butter & Jelly
Bert & Ernie
Salt & Pepa
Batman & Robin
Romeo & Juliet
And hundreds more! If you would like to weigh in on the topic, here is a cool website: https://www.ranker.com/list/best-duos-of-all-time/ariel-kana
Duo has many ampersands as well!
Duo Offers the Broadest Range of Coverage
Founded on the idea that applications can live in many places within your organization, Duo can protect 99% of applications. Yes, I did not say 100% - Duo can not natively do mainframe (HAL 9000 could live behind a “jump host”).
Even though Duo was born in the cloud, our founders Dug & Jon (see what I did there?) realized that on-premises applications and servers were just as critical as cloud and hybrid applications. The Duo documentation page offers step-by-step instructions to deploy the investment of a secure workflow purchase.
How Do We Do It?
Duo takes advantage of standards and a vibrant partner community. Legacy standards include RADIUS, LDAP, REST API, and even a WebSDK. If you don’t feel comfortable starting from scratch? Developers can take advantage of Duo’s Github page: https://github.com/duosecurity Modern standards include FIDO/FIDO2, WebAuthn and SAML.
Partners can easily integrate Duo into the authentication workflow by using Duo’s AuthAPI or the WebSDK. Baking Duo into third-party applications gives companies the quickest way to include a secure authentication workflow.
Want to try it out? Duo makes it easy to test. Companies can sign up for a free trial and jump right into protecting applications. Duo wants organizations to be completely protected, so a Duo license entitles companies to protect as many applications as they can. There are no hidden costs.
Users can authenticate as many times as they need
Users can have as many authenticators as they need
Users can securely access as many applications they are allowed to
Plus, how does no maintenance cost, professional services fees, support costs and continuous upgrades sound?
Duo & makes it easy to roll out to your organization quickly. This approach allows you to reduce user friction while protecting your most critical applications.
That’s All?
Do you remember reading all those “next” technologies mentioned above? I would not be much of a salesperson if I did not answer the question, “What else you got?” Of course, Duo offers multi-factor authentication (MFA), device trust and access controls; you will have an easy way to secure application access and enable the flexibility users need. In summary, Duo offers all the building blocks to help you on your zero trust journey.
Until next time and happy authenticating!
