Cisco Duo is a two-factor authentication system (2FA), acquired by Cisco in October 2018. It provides single sign-on (SSO) and endpoint visibility, as well as access controls and policy controlled adaptive authentication.
$3
per month per user
FreeRADIUS
Score 10.0 out of 10
N/A
The FreeRADIUS project, the open source implementation of RADIUS, is an IETF protocol for AAA (Authorisation, Authentication, and Accounting).
Cisco Duois is well suited in all kinds of scenarios where you need to ensure proper security measurements, I think. We can't just rely on our passwords only, as they can be easily stolen through phishing or data breaches thus keeping multi factor authentication is quite essential. I always prefer MFA or at least 2FA for any critical system.
FreeRADIUS is completely scalable and supports both large and small user databases. Because it doesn't take up a lot of server resources, FreeRADIUS is well-suited for organizations with small budgets (it's in the name!) and limited networking hardware. While there is a port of it for Windows, FreeRADIUS is native to Linux so that would be a limitation for many companies who don't use it.
So outside the obvious of multifactor and it being important, one thing I really like about DUO is the integrations and the options it has for integrations are pretty great. And I'd say versatile. I use Cisco ICE as well and I find I'm more most impressed with Cisco Duo specifically with the weird applications we could come up with for it in using it. So I had say the versatility of authentication and other AAA factors with the Cisco duo are why we like it so much.
Documentation is oftentimes missing key information for proper implementation. This is circumvented by reading third-party guides or contacting support for additional details.
They do not push Fail-Closed as much as I think they should. Fail-Open is fairly trivial to bypass and it should be made known to the customer during setup how much this will affect overall security.
More vendor integration is something that is always craved by administrators. There are so many third-parties to integrate with.
There are a lot of competing solutions on the market; however, Duo "just works", and there is little to no learning curve for the new members to be acclimated to it. As long as that continues I see it as the preferred option moving forward
La interfaz es intuitiva y fácil de navegar, lo que permite a los usuarios administrar sus dispositivos y acceder a las políticas sin problemas. La integración con las aplicaciones SSO y SaaS facilita aún más el proceso de acceso, mejorando la experiencia del usuario.
In the last 5+ years we've been using Duo, there may have been 1 outage that impacted us. We do receive periodic notifications of issues but, for the most part, they impact carriers or functionality that we either don't use, or do not care about.
I have not needed direct support for Cisco Secure Access by Duo as I have not had a problem with it, but I have full confidence that the support is outstanding. It is now a core component of the corporate technology stack - a problem would mean a serious degradation in the ability of the company to function.
Implementation was straight forward and you can isolate different scenarios in order to test new application setup or add to an existing setup. Gui interface is pretty easy to understand and follow. I had no experience with Duo and still manage to easily set up new policies and rules.
It's easier to deploy. When comparing the quality of technical support, Duo Security is the preferred option. Duo has better integration options for out-to-the-box on-premise and cloud applications. The dashboard brings you more reports, and the access event logging is very complete. The quality of end-user training and documentation is superior. I think the relation price vs. value Cisco Secure Access by Duo has the best rating: service & support, integration & deployment, licensing, and capability.
We previously used Microsoft Network Policy Server for our RADIUS authentication which works ok but was pretty clunky and requires Windows Server. Switching to FreeRADIUS brought our cost down to zero.
Because FreeRADIUS works natively in Linux it's easy to setup and works with all distros.
FreeRADIUS allows us to have user authentication for wifi which is much more secure than a simple shared password solution.
