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
DiskStation
Score 8.8 out of 10
N/A
DiskStation is a line of network-attached storage (NAS) solutions from Synology headquartered in Taiwan.
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.
The Synology DiskStation is well suited as a NAS solution, easy enough to mirror a Windows file server shares setup. Access to the Hyperbackup utility eliminates the need to purchase a tape backup solution. A portable USB drive can be used as the initial backup target. For air gap purposes can connect Hyperbackup to the various cloud providers such as AWS, Azure, GCP to copy backup data there. Utilizing it as a backup solution has also been great, instead of purchasing a tape solution, tapes and an offsite tape repository. Active Backup for Business is another excellent backup utility for physical servers, VMWare virtual machines, etc. Restoring files is fairly intuitive. Until Synology introduced the dual controller setup, using it as a SAN was less appropriate as there was occasional downtime when the controller had an issue but this was less important for the scenarios we were using it for. It would be more of a concern if we had used it for things that require more robust uptime requirements. Overall we are happy with the features of the Synology DiskStation.
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.
Synology DiskStation offers lots of options for creating links to share files or request that some uploads files. It makes it really easy to just share a link that can have an expiration or a set number of times it is accessed.
We always had enough storage on our Synology DiskStation, we never had to worry about something being too big to upload or share.
Love how you can create folders that are shared and also have some that are private. This makes it so easy to have shared collaborations with coworkers or clients, but also allows you to have a private place to save things that only you need.
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.
While BTRFS is a more advanced file system than ext4, it also is in a perpetual state of development, with many features not fully functional and a plethora of bugs. Synology has managed to overcome many of these limitations by placing BTRFS on top of a LVM, but there are much better file systems that Synology could have used, such as OpenZFS.
DSM's built-in backup software, HyperBackup, while robust, oftentimes runs into issues. Specifically, backups can be working fine for months or years, and then suddenly the backups will fail. Sometimes these failures can be resolved, but oftentimes the backups need to be completely restarted. Fortunately, even when the backup fails, the existing backups are still accessible, it is just that new backups can not be performed.
The underlying Linux OS provides significant benefits, but also adds a fair amount of complexity. Most of that complexity is wonderfully hidden by the DSM interface, but when certain problems arise, delving into the Linux command line is not out of the question.
Perhaps the biggest issue with Synology DiskStation is Synology's support. The issue isn't that the support is bad, but it can be frustratingly slow when dealing with a major issue. Synology does have a very active community that is always willing to help, but nothing beats first-party support.
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
As long as Synology give us support for our hard drivers we will not change. I know Synology has now forced their hands to buy their own hard drivers and their new line of products. But if we still have support for old hard drivers from other manufacturers then we will still use Synology Nas. Otherwise we change manufacturers
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.
The Synology DiskStation is easy to set up and manage. The interface is clean and features are well documented. These units are reliable and can be set up to do scheduled integrity checks so failures can be mitigated before they halt business operations. The available packages for expanded roles makes these devices versatile.
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.
Unfortunately, the one time I've had to reach out to DiskStation support, it did not go well. My NAS appliance wasn't appearing on the network, and no matter what the support team tried, they could not get it back online. Instead of offering to send me a new unit, they told me to go buy a new one - obviously, this was a disappointing response and not very eco-friendly either! Fortunately, through some internet research of my own, and some ingenuity, I figured out I could restore my NAS to factory settings by removing all the drives and resetting. Only then did I realize I had a bad disk. I had to experiment for a while to figure out which one it was. Once I had done that, though, I was able to get the latest DiskStation loaded back on, no thanks to the DiskStation support crew. If notifications were rock solid, I suspect I would have caught the bad disk before it because an OS problem, but I never received a bad-disk notification.
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.
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.
Synology DiskStation packs a punch with the latest and greatest feature set which goes above and beyond many other vendors. It allows for a turn-key solution to cover almost every use case in the SMB market leaving other vendors behind.
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.
