Dive in With Duo Passport: A Secure, Seamless Future
Duo has long been the most loved company in security. But here’s the thing: That’s despite MFA being the most grumbled-about part of many end-users’ day. While our customers love us for our ease of use, flexibility and focus on security, a lot of end users think of Duo the way they think of floss, bike helmets and low-sodium foods. Secure authentication isn’t fun, but you put up with it as part of your day because you know it’s keeping you safer.
At Duo, we are constantly pushing the envelope — how can we deliver the security that our customers need, with less inconvenience for end users? Can we make secure access a positive experience for our end users? That’s why we’re so excited to bring to market Duo Passport — a new capability that drives secure, seamless access to all the permitted applications with just one interactive authentication.
Over the past decade, MFA adoption has increased across organizations of all sizes. This is a great thing and a huge achievement for the security teams. However, it’s led to an unfortunate side effect: lots of workers, through no fault of their own and without presenting any particular risk, end up authenticating again, and again and again throughout their day. It’s normal to use an email client, a VPN, a browser, and maybe a handful of other apps in your to-do list; so why do authentication vendors put up so many walls for you?
Duo Passport reduced end-user authentication by more than 65% in one customer, who tested it over several months.
Enter Duo Passport: A better way forward
When Duo Passport is enabled, a user’s authentication is remembered for a specified time period by Duo’s cloud services across all of their applications. It leverages device binding, facilitated by Duo Desktop, to deliver a Remembered Device experience, even as the end user moves across web applications and client-based applications. Unlike other solutions, Passport does not rely on just the cookie store in the browser, or each application’s settings, to deliver a seamless experience for end-users and minimize repeated authentication requests.
Duo meets the user wherever their day starts and works behind the scenes as they move through their tasks.
Here’s where Passport gets cool: it’s customizable to your environment and compatible with all other strong security features that Duo offers. Let’s look at some examples!
One of the customers in our private preview program is an enterprise electronics company. They protect Windows Logon in their environment, as well as hundreds of applications. Some of these applications are browser-based SaaS applications, and many of them have their own clients. By rolling out Passport to more than a thousand users in their trial, they’ve saved tens of thousands of authentications that their end users didn’t have to complete interactively, while resting assured that Duo was still enforcing security through these integrations. This customer plans to roll Passport out to more than 18,000 users, and had this to say:
“The experience with Duo Passport has been really good and the feedback from all 1300 pilot users has been extremely positive. In the past, our use of MFA has been very strict and this has eased up on the end user friction that we were inadvertently putting on users.”
In another example, let’s look at Cisco’s own implementation of Duo. Cisco has deployed Passwordless widely, uses Risk-Based Authentication, and enforces Trusted Endpoints as well as Device Posture using Duo Desktop. Passport works seamlessly with all of these features! Passport adoption here is well under way, with plans for a company-wide rollout.
“With Duo, we are able to strike the right balance between User Experience and Security. It is rare that these words are used together in one statement when it comes to security related enforcements. Our User Experience satisfaction score is increasing every quarter and at the same time our security team is happy with the enforcements we are able to implement.” — Sarabjeet Rana, Information Security Architect at Cisco
A great litmus test for any balance of security and end user experience is understanding how Managed Service Providers feel about it. We’ve had a great partnership throughout our preview program with several MSPs, which speaks to the improved end user experience that Passport delivers.
“Duo Passport is an essential step on our road to making secure access the default for our customers. We selected Duo as our partner because of their attention to ease of use and their expertise across platforms. We are accelerating our deployment of Duo Passport to maximize the strength of our customers’ defenses while we keep interruptions of their workflows to the minimum.” — JustWorks, a pure play MSP founded in 1996
Duo Passport is available today, to all Duo Advantage and Premier customers. You can enable it yourself now.
We’re really excited to get this in your hands and are already hard at work on what’s next. We’re bringing Passport to multi-user scenarios, which has been requested by all our healthcare customers in preview. And if you thought that we didn’t like too many authentications…just wait until we tell you about our thoughts on passwords and remember-me cookies!