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Product & Engineering

5 Reasons to Choose Duo Over Free Multi-Factor Authentication

While free or low-cost multi-factor authentication (MFA) can be helpful for organizations with limited use cases and narrow security needs, many organizations find themselves in need of a more robust solution to fully secure their workforce. 

Here are five reasons organizations choose Duo over free MFA. 

Lower Total Cost of Ownership

Companies find Duo’s setup, management and support costs are often much lower than other security solutions. Our per-user licensing, which protects unlimited applications and access through Duo’s single sign-on (SSO), comes with no hidden costs.

It’s not uncommon for a company to roll out Duo to thousands of users and only receive a handful of help desk tickets. Other support needs, such as password resets, also often decrease after a Duo rollout.

Flexible for Complex Environments

Organizations that have complex environments find that Duo is a great fit. For example, Duo can handle:

  • Hybrid mix of cloud, on-premises and custom applications

  • Multiple identity providers or VPNs

  • Geographically distributed workforce

  • Contractors and vendors

  • Growth from mergers and acquisitions 

We design security for the tough cases because rarely is a little security good enough. Our customers find access, productivity and security all improve immensely with Duo — a rare trifecta!

Integrates With Everything

Being system agnostic means we can integrate with the broadest range of platforms and applications. Customers like that they aren’t forced to pick and choose which applications to protect based on their security vendor.

You can easily protect cloud applications, VPNs, CRMs, on-premises and custom applications. We have many native integrations and are unique in our ability to protect RDP, Windows Offline and SSH logins. With Duo Single Sign-On, Passwordless abilities and Duo Network Gateway (DNG) it’s easy to have continuous trusted access that limits the need for passwords.

The Duo Network Gateway is a remote access proxy security solution that helps employees, remote workers, and contractors access the applications they need to do their job by increasing productivity and reducing friction. It gives you granular access control per web application, set of SSH servers, and user groups. You can specify different policies to make sure only trusted users and endpoints can access your internal services. It secures access from hybrid and multi-cloud environments.

Ease of Use and User Satisfaction

Duo can protect even the most complex applications in a matter of minutes, and admins find our portal easy to use. As one customer said, “Every software vendor says they are easy. This is the first product that delivers.”

“We need to ensure the highest level of protection for all user interactions with our services. We also need to meet an extremely high bar for security standards while making it easy for users to be productive. Duo helps us do just that.” —Mark Schooley, Senior Director, IT Operations & Engineering, Box

Device Trust

Duo continuously inspects each device at every access attempt and can enforce hygiene requirements, such as requiring an up-to-date browser or operating system. It can identify which devices are managed by the company and which are not. Self-remediation helps users get up-to-date security patches. 

Duo’s policy engine allows admins to create per-application access policies to define access policies by user group and per application. Best of all, this can be done without deploying any agents on the endpoints. Duo Trust Monitor uses AI (artificial intelligence) to detect any suspicious activity and send alerts.

Overall, Duo offers a great value in having a layered, continuously monitored security approach that meets the early stage criteria of a zero trust framework. There are no hidden costs or complicated setup issues. Duo adds value in time and effort, plus extensive features that are more secure than MFA alone.

Try Duo For Free

With our free 30-day trial, see how easy it is to get started with Duo and secure your workforce from anywhere, on any device.