Cisco Duo vs. SMS PASSCODE vs. Yubico YubiKeys

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.

Incentivized

Yubico YubiKeys will likely always be my default recommendation for hardware security keys. It's well suited for environments where key portability is necessary, and for privileged environments where step-up or separate authentication hardware benefits the situation. For example, I can step up my Microsoft rights through PIM, but I'm required to use a Yubico YubiKey (AAGUID filter) even if I'm already using Windows Hello. This means that accessing my workstation doesn't grant rights, accessing my device AND my Yubico YubiKey does. I wouldn't necessarily recommend deploying Yubico YubiKeys to entire user populaces unless the situation calls for it (shared workstations, compliance environments, etc.). This is primarily centered around user training (which is a low bar, but still different), and dealing with loss (you'll want to budget for a % of key loss and be ready to rapidly issue replacements).

Incentivized

• 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.

Incentivized

• So as I said, the second-factor authentication that it does is really well. The response time is really good and all you have to do is just enter the second factor code and that's about it. Right? So that's the good part about using Yubico YubiKeys.

Incentivized

• 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.

• It can be about access control because either right now it's just you have access or you don't have access. I think there can be a use case where you are allowed a particular set of servers and not a particular set of servers. I think maybe it's there or we don't use it, but I haven't seen that. I think I've used Yubico YubiKeys at two companies and I haven't seen that. Maybe that's something that can be added.

Incentivized

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

Incentivized

As for implementing YubiKey its simple so I don't see us using anything else as we have experienced no issues so fare. Adding these to our environment is still new for us currently but in the transition phase I only see us buying YubiKey. It is highly rated and well known and cost is reasonable so no need to find another solution.

Incentivized

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.

Incentivized

I give slightly better than average rating because of the complexity in using a Yubikey. It is not as easy as native push notifications for 2FA products, however, it provides much better strength. Rating this higher or lower would be a disservice to people reading this review. If you are in the market for a hardware 2FA tool, Yubikey will be a great asset in your toolbox.

Incentivized

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.

We have not experienced any issues with availability which is very important when you are dealing with a company that holds the keys to the gate. We have had more issues with availability from our SaaS providers before with authentication but that was on their end. YubiKey has worked every time for us over the course of the last 6 or so months we began testing phase.

Incentivized

We do not see any degradation of performance of the protected applications. There are occasional lags in receiving the push but no show stooppers.

We have not seen any lag in loading pages and getting into systems or sites. In comparison to other 2FA and MFA options it is actually faster most of the time to authenticate due to not having to type in. We require users to have long passwords and when there is an option given for password less they jump on it with excitement. As we explore going password less on their PC's the YubiKey is going to make their lives a lot easier to access the resources they need.

Incentivized

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.

Incentivized

We have only interacted with support once but it was quick and easily answered. Mostly just questions regarding adding this to certain apps.

Incentivized

There was no in person training but checking the box was the only way I could complete all of the questions.

This was not organized training but the videos that Duo provides to teach you how to install a particular integration are top notch.

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.

Incentivized

I figured it all out on my own with the excellent product documentation provided by Yubico. I even managed to produce a backup YubiKey in case I lost my frequently used one. This was crucial when I temporarily lost the original.

Incentivized

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.

Incentivized

Yubico YubiKeys has been a leader in the security key market, and I think they have a new product we just read about two days back and they can store up to a hundred private keys now. So I think this is what it distinguishes them from the market, apart from this, whatever features we need personally and for our customers. So they provide all those features, but versus the other brands.

Incentivized

So far, the only limits we've encountered were tied to our imagination. Duo's strong list of supported integrations is amazing.

For us I feel like the ease of deployment has made this product very appealing, overall this will make the scalability very easy for us to push out once we roll out to our users and the management tools that we have looked at will make the admins like me happy as it is clear and easy to use. The rollout process looks to be very straight forward from the demos that we have looked at regarding the enterprise tools.

Incentivized

• 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.

Incentivized

• I think it's the flexibility in being able to let users pick the type of authentications that they want to use. Some are comfortable with the touch device on the physical Yubico YubiKeys. Others prefer the mobile app. So it provides flexibility for our users to choose how they want to authenticate without running a file of our security requirements.

Incentivized