Introducing Cisco Duo: Industry-Leading 2FA

CSP is proud to announce that we now use Cisco Duo’s 2FA solution to secure our clients’ logins.

Maintaining strong and complex passwords may sound easy in theory, but in reality, most users opt for easy-to-remember passwords instead.

Two-factor authentication (2FA) is a great way to overcome the users’ resistance to maintaining strong passwords, while still ensuring adequate standards of cybersecurity. After all, it blocks 99.9% of identity-based attacks.

While there is a range of 2FA solutions on the market, CSP trusts Duo’s offering to keep our clients secure.

Cisco Duo: A Non-Negotiable In Cybersecurity

2FA requires the user to utilize two methods to confirm that they are the rightful account owner. There are three categories of information that can be used in this process:

• Something you have: Includes a mobile phone, app, or generated code
• Something you know: A family member’s name, city of birth, pin, or phrase
• Something you are: Includes fingerprints and facial recognition

Cisco Duo offers a range of key benefits to modern businesses which help to increase security without affecting the user experience:

• Bring Your Own Device: In today’s modern business world, more and more employees prefer to do at least some of their work through their mobile devices, which can present a serious security risk. However, with a 2FA solution, you can enroll new employee devices in minutes, given that there’s no need to install an endpoint agent.

• Convenient Flexibility: A 2FA solution won’t force you to apply the same security policies to every user in the company. Instead, you are given the capability to specify policies person by person or group by group.

Cisco Duo’s Many Features

Mobile Convenience

Duo Mobile keeps your staff secure on the go, verifying the identities of your users quickly and easily with push-based notifications to help protect against phishing and other identity-based attacks.

Wide Range Of Authentication Methods

Duo offers methods for verification that fit your business’ needs, whether it’s temporary access to get approval on a sensitive document, or limited access to let a client have a look at precisely the files you want them to.

Robust User Access Policies

You can set simple, contextual user access policies that will follow adaptive authentication, providing you with the ability to exercise more control over those who are given access to your applications.

Why Is 2FA So Important & So Popular?

If you’ve hesitated to enable 2FA for your accounts because it seems too complicated or too fiddly for everyday use, you should know that the benefits greatly outstrip the perceived annoyance.

The protection that 2FA adds allows you to use your passwords for a longer length of time between password resets, and in the event that your service provider is compromised and your email and password end up in an open database on the open web, you will have time to change your password before your individual account is compromised.

You may not need 2FA for every account you use—but for your email accounts, financial services, and work-related accounts, if 2FA is an option, you should enable it.

If it’s not an option, you should ask yourself, and perhaps the service itself, why you would keep using a service that doesn’t offer an easy step to keep your data secure?

Microsoft Users Need To Use 2FA

At a recent RSA security conference, Microsoft engineers told attendees that 99.9% of the accounts that are compromised each month don’t have a 2FA solution enabled.

That’s why you need to disable legacy authentication protocols and update to one that supports 2FA. Microsoft notes that doing so has resulted in a 67% reduction in breaches. They also provide a built-in 2FA feature, called Microsoft Authenticator.

CSP Will Help Protect Your Accounts

If you’re unsure about how to implement a 2FA solution, don’t try to handle it all on your own.

CSP will help you evaluate your password practices and security measures as a whole to make sure you’re not taking on any unnecessary risks.

We will guide you in implementing 2FA for your entire staff, ensuring your data is properly protected.