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
Microsoft Azure
Score 8.5 out of 10
N/A
Microsoft Azure is a cloud computing platform and infrastructure for building, deploying, and managing applications and services through a global network of Microsoft-managed datacenters.
$29
per month
Pricing
Cisco Duo
Microsoft Azure
Editions & Modules
Duo Essentials
$3
per month per user
Duo Advantage
$6
per month per user
Duo Premier
$9
per month per user
Developer
$29
per month
Standard
$100
per month
Professional Direct
$1000
per month
Basic
Free
per month
Offerings
Pricing Offerings
Cisco Duo
Microsoft Azure
Free Trial
Yes
Yes
Free/Freemium Version
No
Yes
Premium Consulting/Integration Services
No
No
Entry-level Setup Fee
No setup fee
No setup fee
Additional Details
—
The free tier lets users have access to a variety of services free for 12 months with limited usage after making an Azure account.
We looked at user Azure AD MFA but ultimately went with DUO because of their level of experience and the installation services. After using both, I don't really have an issue with either one and would be happy with either product to support and to trust in the security.
General user support, setting up new devices, migrating users (who have a new phone) is painless. It also provides options, so if push notifications don't work, or just because a users has a preference, you can receive phone call authentication - great feature which means you …
Cisco Secure Access by Duo, against WatchGuard AuthPoint, is a broader tool with more applicability across applications to my knowledge. I also find it to be faster, and simpler for users to understand. For example, with Authpoint, the tokens that appear and "count down" seem …
Our school is based in Microsoft 365. Azure has a product built into their licensing (provided you have purchased the appropriate level or the add-on product.) The MFA in Azure is a work in process and doesn't offer broad integration options as Duo does. We didn't look into any …
Duo Security has everything that we need. Didn’t find any missing feature. Quality of support as I mentioned before, is amazing. Easy to set up and use as compared to others. Pleasurable in terms of doing business with. Provides multi device sync and also backs up data. …
Azure is free so with our Microsoft 365 licenses so that is going to be tough to get away from that. Duo / Cisco Secure Access, by Duo, is a better platform for both Windows and Linux.
Okta does offer similar solutions to Duo / Cisco Secure Access, by Duo, but Okta has a higher price-point from our initial investigations into which provider to use. The support that we received from Duo was top-notch and the ease of use really helped to decide which solution …
We looked at Okta, and Okta is a great solution, but much larger in scope than what we needed. When we start our journey to identify/access management we will definitely consider them.
Microsoft was useful too, and minimal cost. It didn't seem to have as much support from …
For secure access to apps and business data, I recommend Cisco Duo. It offers SSO, MFA, and Passwordless access, ensuring teams can securely access business data. It is easy to customize and comes with top-tier security features. It protects business data, apps, and users.
Azure is particularly well suited for enterprise environments with existing Microsoft investments, those that require robust compliance features, and organizations that need hybrid cloud capabilities that bridge on-premises and cloud infrastructure. In my opinion, Azure is less appropriate for cost-sensitive startups or small businesses without dedicated cloud expertise and scenarios requiring edge computing use cases with limited connectivity. Azure offers comprehensive solutions for most business needs but can feel like there is a higher learning curve than other cloud-based providers, depending on the product and use case.
We use Cisco Duo with different type of device and application, but we never face any difficulties to integrate Cisco Duo with any of them.
We integrated Cisco Duo with some of our active directory and some of the OS are quite old but Cisco Duo works totally fine with them.
The end user application is very easy to use. We never had any complain from non tech team members of having trouble of using Cisco Duo.
There are several authentication methods available rather than passcode. I personally like the push notification which is always on time and quite fast.
Microsoft Azure is highly scalable and flexible. You can quickly scale up or down additional resources and computing power.
You have no longer upfront investments for hardware. You only pay for the use of your computing power, storage space, or services.
The uptime that can be achieved and guaranteed is very important for our company. This includes the rapid maintenance for security updates that are mostly carried out by Microsoft.
The wide range of capabilities of services that are possible in Microsoft Azure. You can practically put or create anything in Microsoft Azure.
Should have device to device connection ability whereas internet is not met.
Changes of device can be sorted and easily made using a second email address or any other identification method.
Troubleshooting should be easy to sort out. One time, a Duo admin deleted the authentication group, and some employees were not getting push notifications. It was very hard to find out the cause. Duo should have some troubleshooting finder.
Sometimes push notifications are delayed, and the code does not work. At that time, we need to enroll the device again. Not sure why it happens. Duo should give reasons for the error.
The cost of resources is difficult to determine, technical documentation is frequently out of date, and documentation and mapping capabilities are lacking.
The documentation needs to be improved, and some advanced configuration options require research and experimentation.
Microsoft's licensing scheme is too complex for the average user, and Azure SQL syntax is too different from traditional SQL.
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
Moving to Azure was and still is an organizational strategy and not simply changing vendors. Our product roadmap revolved around Azure as we are in the business of humanitarian relief and Azure and Microsoft play an important part in quickly and efficiently serving all of the world. Migration and investment in Azure should be considered as an overall strategy of an organization and communicated companywide.
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.
As Microsoft Azure is [doing a] really good with PaaS. The need of a market is to have [a] combo of PaaS and IaaS. While AWS is making [an] exceptionally well blend of both of them, Azure needs to work more on DevOps and Automation stuff. Apart from that, I would recommend Azure as a great platform for cloud services as scale.
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.
We were running Windows Server and Active Directory, so [Microsoft] Azure was a seamless transition. We ran into a few, if any support issues, however, the availability of Microsoft Azure's support team was more than willing and able to guide us through the process. They even proposed solutions to issues we had not even thought of!
Documentation could have been better. I had to piece together different KB/admin guides to make certain things work and I also had to use third-party guides to get bits of information that were missing from Cisco Duo documentation. Support was also engaged multiple times to figure out an issue and after some back and forth it was usually determined that the information I needed was hidden somewhere else and had no direct correlation with the document that was linked from the platform.
As I have mentioned before the issue with my Oracle Mismatch Version issues that have put a delay on moving one of my platforms will justify my 7 rating.
Ultimately we ended up going with Cisco Duo because we are a Cisco shop. All of our networking infrastructure, our phones, our wireless environment is Cisco based. It made logical sense to stay with a product that we already have a line of support with. With a smaller support / tech group we depend on outside Cisco support. That support is already here for us, so we stayed with a Cisco product.
As I continue to evaluate the "big three" cloud providers for our clients, I make the following distinctions, though this gap continues to close. AWS is more granular, and inherently powerful in the configuration options compared to [Microsoft] Azure. It is a "developer" platform for cloud. However, Azure PowerShell is helping close this gap. Google Cloud is the leading containerization platform, largely thanks to it building kubernetes from the ground up. Azure containerization is getting better at having the same storage/deployment options.
It's one of those things that only costs money in the sense of you have to convince a leadership team to spend money to save money, right? Like a compromise is far more expensive than duo paying for duo. So specifically it's really just about trying to prevent problems. And so while it costs money and we don't have a direct return on investment that we can point out immediately, I would still always advocate for it just because it keeps security. Paying for security is cheaper than getting compromised essentially.
For about 2 years we didn't have to do anything with our production VMs, the system ran without a hitch, which meant our engineers could focus on features rather than infrastructure.
DNS management was very easy in Azure, which made it easy to upgrade our cluster with zero downtime.
Azure Web UI was easy to work with and navigate, which meant our senior engineers and DevOps team could work with Azure without formal training.
