At Cisco Duo, we continually strive to enhance our products to make it easy for security practitioners to apply access policies based on the principles of zero trust. This blog highlights how Duo is achieving that goal by simplifying user and administrator experience and supporting data sovereignty requirements for customers around the world. Read on to get an overview of what we have been delivering to our customers in those areas in the past few months.

Simplifying Administrator and End-User Experience for Secure Access 

Duo strives to make secure access frictionless for employees while reducing the administrative burden on IT (Information Technology) and helpdesk teams. This is made possible thanks to the strong relationship between our customers and our user research team. The insights we gained helped us implement some exciting enhancements to Duo Single Sign-On (SSO) and Device Trust capabilities.

Duo SSO unifies identities across systems and reduces the number of credentials a user must remember and enter to gain access to resources. Active Directory (AD) is the most popular authentication source connected to Duo SSO, accounting for almost 80% of all setups. To make Duo’s integration with AD even easier to implement, we have introduced Duo SSO support for multiple Active Directory forests for organizations that have users in multiple domains. Additionally, we added the Expired Password Resets feature in Duo SSO. It provides an easy experience for users to quickly reset their expired Active Directory password, log into their application, and carry on with their day. Continuing the theme of self service, we introduced a hosted device management portal – a highly requested feature from customers. Now administrators no longer need to host and manage the portal, and end users can login with Duo SSO to manage their authentication devices (e.g.: TouchID, security keys, mobile phone etc.) without needing to open IT helpdesk tickets.

We are also simplifying the administrator experience. We have made it easy for administrators to configure Duo SSO with Microsoft 365 using an out of the box integration. Duo SSO layers Duo’s strong authentication and flexible policy engine on top of Microsoft 365 logins. Further, we have heard from many customers that they want to deliver a seamless on-brand login experience for their workforce. To support this, we have made custom branding so simple that administrators can quickly customize their end-user authentication experience from the settings page in the Duo Admin Panel.

Device Trust is a critical capability required to enable secure access for the modern workforce from any location. We have made it easy for organizations to adopt device trust and distinguish between managed and unmanaged devices. Organizations can enforce a Trusted Endpoint policy to allow access only from managed devices for critical applications. We have eliminated the requirement to deploy and manage device certificates to enforce this policy. Device Health application now checks the managed status of a device. This lowers administrative overhead while enabling organizations to achieve a better balance between security and usability. We have also added out-of-box integrations with unified endpoint management solutions such as Active Directory domain-joined devices, Microsoft Intune, Jamf Pro and VMware Workspace ONE. For organizations that have deployed a solution that is not listed above, Duo provides a Device API that works with any enterprise device management system.

 Supporting Global Data Sovereignty Requirements 

To support our growing customer base around the world, Duo expanded its data center presence to  Australia, Singapore, and Japan in September last year. And now Duo is thrilled to announce the launch of the two new data centers in the UK and India. Both the new and existing data centers will allow customers to meet all local requirements, all while maintaining ISO27001 and SOC2 compliance and a 99.999% service availability goal.

The launch of the new data centers is the backbone of Duo’s international expansion strategy. In the last two years, Duo has met key international growth milestones and completed the C5 attestation (Germany), AgID certification (Italy) and IRAP assessment (Australia) – all of which demonstrate that Duo meets the mandatory baseline standards for use by the public sector in the countries listed above. Check out this Privacy Data Sheet to learn more about Cisco Duo’s commitment to our customer’s data privacy and data sovereignty.

Cisco Duo Continues to Democratize Security 

That is a summary of what we have been up to here at Cisco Duo in the past few months. But we are not done yet! Stay tuned for more exciting announcements at RSA Conference 2022 next week. Visit us at our booth at RSAC 2022 and World of solutions at Cisco Live 2022.

In the meanwhile, check out this on-demand #CiscoChat panel discussion with real-world security practitioners on how they have implemented secure access best practices for hybrid work using Duo. And if you do not want to wait, sign-up for a 30 day trial and experience how Duo can simplify secure access for your workforce.

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