Fastly > Case Studies > Duo Enhances Cybersecurity with Fastly for Improved User Experience

Duo Enhances Cybersecurity with Fastly for Improved User Experience

Technology Category

Cybersecurity & Privacy - Application Security
Cybersecurity & Privacy - Identity & Authentication Management

Applicable Industries

Buildings
National Security & Defense

Use Cases

Cybersecurity
Tamper Detection

About The Customer

Duo is a cybersecurity company that provides secure access solutions to over 40,000 customers globally. The company's platform supports billions of authentication requests every week, making it a trusted choice for businesses seeking robust cybersecurity solutions. Duo was recently named the best two-factor authentication app by the New York Times Wirecutter, further solidifying its reputation in the industry. The company is committed to delivering effective, user-focused, and intuitive products, and continuously works towards enhancing its offerings to ensure optimal user experience and security.

The Challenge

Duo, a leading cybersecurity company, was seeking to enhance the security visibility of its authentication platform and websites without introducing additional security or operational risks. The company's platform supports billions of authentication requests globally every week, and it was crucial to secure this traffic without negatively impacting the user experience or introducing additional security risks. Duo's previous experiences with hardware and cloud Web Application Firewalls (WAFs) had introduced single points of failure and had difficulties integrating into the path of traffic, prompting the need for an alternative approach.

The Solution

Duo selected Fastly for its ability to provide immediate security visibility and blocking with an architecture that operations teams were confident would scale without impacting performance. Fastly's pragmatic approach, based on its previous experience running engineering and security at one of the Alexa top-100 ranked sites, appealed to all stakeholders at Duo. The secure architecture of Fastly easily integrated into Duo’s environment without requiring a lot of resources to deploy or becoming an attack surface. Fastly’s software wasn’t susceptible to additional attacks and its patented module and agent architecture is guaranteed to fail-open, ensuring a graceful failure if it were to occur.

Operational Impact

The implementation of Fastly's solution resulted in significant operational benefits for Duo. The security team found that real security, not just a product deployed in logging mode, was possible with the Next-Gen WAF, without negatively impacting the performance of its customers. This meant that legitimate customers could continue to authenticate while malicious actors were stopped. Furthermore, Fastly's solution integrated seamlessly into Duo's environment without requiring a lot of resources to deploy or becoming an attack surface. This ensured that Duo's operations were not disrupted, and the company could continue to provide its services without any hindrance.

Quantitative Benefit

Fastly's solution provided immediate security visibility and blocking for Duo's platform.
Fastly's architecture was able to scale without impacting Duo's performance.
Duo experienced zero false positives while Fastly's solution was installed in production.