Networking News

Cisco Explains The Wow Factor Behind Its Duo Security Acquisition

Cisco says Duo Security’s cloud-based model adds more services opportunities for its channel partners.

Cisco’s acquisition of Duo Security last October is paying off: The networking giant says Duo ranks as its highest growth product coming into the company. Plus, it’s an offering that provides even more services opportunities to partners.

Cisco’s Senior Director of Business Development Steve Benvenuto and Duo’s co-founder, Jon Oberheide, discussed the details of the acquisition in an interview with CRN at Cisco Live.

What does Duo bring to Cisco’s security business?

Oberheide: Duo is all about securing access enterprise environment: How can I make sure my end-users and my devices can securely access any application that they can have access to? That’s the real value that Cisco saw in Duo when we were approaching the acquisition and we saw the changing enterprise perimeter. How do we secure users in a new environment and what’s the new security architecture that’s necessary for customers to move to? We call that Cisco Zero Trust.

What opportunities does Duo offer to Cisco’s channel partners?

Benvenuto: Duo is our highest growth product right now coming into the company, so that’s fantastic. It continues to expand this portfolio of products that we’ve been building and acquiring over the last 5 or 6 years. So, from a partner perspective it adds another security story that they can take to their customers. It’s cloud and SaaS-based which is fantastic because partners are moving to this recurring revenue model, so it sets up very nicely for how they want to transform their business.

How does Duo continue to innovate and advance its technology?

Oberheide: Multi-factor is a really interesting space because it is literally the oldest category in security. It was invented in 1985 before we even had firewalls. So, it really is the basics and fundamentals of any security program. Basics doesn’t mean easy but all customers, big or small, have to protect their user identities, so we see that as one of clearest threats and most obvious solutions for credential thefts and phishing at scale. The challenge that organizations have is that it’s cumbersome to deploy. That’s where Duo is really innovative in really building security technology for people that’s easy to use for employee access.