Securing Remote Access With Duo and Akamai’s Zero-Trust Integration
Summary:
- Organizations need to provide easy and secure remote access to an increasingly mobile and dispersed workforce.
- Traditional solutions like virtual private networks (VPNs) are complex, costly and deliver a poor end user experience. They also increase the risk for security breaches.
- Duo’s integration with Akamai Enterprise Application Access (EAA) uses a zero-trust security architecture to offer easy and secure remote access to on-premises apps - without the complexity and pain of a VPN.
- Duo’s integration with Akamai EAA is available with Duo MFA, Duo Access and Duo Beyond.
Many of us have experienced the convenience of working from any location, using devices of our choice, and connecting through the internet to our workplace resources and tools. Organizations around the world not only support this modern workstyle for their employees, but increasingly support it for their community of partners, contractors and remote users.
Offering remote access, however, adds new security challenges. Traditional solutions like virtual private networks (VPNs) can be complex, costly to deploy and maintain, provide a poor end user experience (have you ever tried using a VPN on a mobile device?), and increase the surface area for security incidents or potential breaches. They also lack the ability to segment privileged access based on users or applications.
So what is the alternative to traditional remote access solutions?
We are excited to offer a better approach to remote access: Duo now integrates with Akamai Enterprise Application Access (EAA) to offer customers a more secure and user friendly remote access alternative to VPNs.
Zero-Trust Security: A Better Approach to Remote Access
With a Duo and Akamai EAA solution, organizations can adopt zero-trust security architecture for remote access. They can shed the dependency on the network perimeter as a measure of trust while adopting strong authentication and authorization of every user and every device for every access request.
Users get access only to the applications they are authorized to use only after strong verification of their identity and the trustworthiness and security hygiene of their device. Users access applications from a cloud-hosted, user-friendly application portal, and do not require an agent on their devices.
Here’s how it works:
- When a user tries to access an application delivered by Akamai’s EAA or the EAA service itself, they are presented with the Duo Prompt.
- At the time of login, Duo verifies the user through multi-factor authentication (MFA).
- Duo also verifies the security posture of the device based on the version of OS, browser, plugins etc.
- Duo also checks if device is corporate-managed or not to establish its trustworthiness.
Only verified users with trusted and compliant devices are allowed to access the application.
Easy-to-Deploy, Native Duo and EAA Integration
Duo is natively integrated into the EAA administration portal, providing administrators out-of-the-box seamless configuration of fine-grained access policies based on user and device trust, and the security posture of the device.
Even the largest enterprises can onboard new external users – contractors, business partners, remote full-time workers – in minutes instead of days or weeks.
Duo is always looking for ways to securely enable customers to embrace new technologies to adapt to the changes in how we work. Duo’s integration with Akamai EAA is another example of helping organizations adopt a zero-trust security architecture for remote access for the modern workforce.
Bye for now,
Vishal