Yelp + Duo
Online business review giant Yelp chose Duo Security over competitors due to a higher level of confidence in the quality of Duo's security solutions.
We were incredibly blown away at how our deployment went...this was the easiest deployment we’ve ever done. I’m really impressed.
The Challenge
As one of the most trusted and widely used resources for online business reviews, Yelp’s operations span 24 countries and counting.
In order to protect employee access to their corporate network, including engineers and executives internationally, their security team enlisted Duo Security’s two-factor authentication solution for fast and easy deployment, low costs, and high confidence in our steadfast dedication to security.
According to Yelp’s security team, they were interested in two-factor to prevent unauthorized access to their corporate network, by protecting their SSH and VPN connections.
Company-wide, Yelp’s employees needed to access their internal networks for the resources and tools necessary to do their jobs - engineers, executives and a remote team in Germany all needed to securely VPN into their network. Additionally, other employees needed remote access if they worked outside of normal work hours. But with access comes the necessity to verify their identities and permissions.
The Solution
Yelp chose Duo Security over competitors due to a higher level of confidence in the quality of our security solutions, according to Yelp’s Security Manager, Ivan Leichtling.
Duo vs. Competitors: Lower cost, higher confidence.
Yelp lacked security confidence and trust in competitor solutions, and they also thought leading competitor costs were unreasonably high. At Duo Security, every component of our technology and infrastructure is the result of a careful, considered approach to secure systems design and engineering; find out more in Security & Reliability. As a cloud-based solution, Duo keeps costs down by eliminating the need for on-premise software and hardware, with minimal support and overhead.
Initially, Yelp also had certain questions about their two-factor solution, including whether or not they could apply Duo’s solution to many of the different scenarios they had. Duo Security resolved all of their questions, providing one extremely versatile solution, perfect for each different employee access scenario. Here’s how:
Can we use it with third parties? Would we be able to use it with Salesforce or any other integration? Duo Security’s two-factor authentication works with all of Yelp’s VPN (Juniper and OpenVPN) and SSH solutions. They gained confidence that they could do third-party integrations due to the extensive documentation provided on Duo’s website. And, after reading the documentation and doing individual test deployments on their own personal servers, they determined it would be easy to deploy.
If we have limited network connectivity, will we be able to use second factor, or will we lock ourselves out of a data center? Can traveling or international engineers in remote locations authenticate with a second factor? Yelp verified that push notifications in the Duo mobile app would work for people anywhere in the world, while SMS and phone calls could work in a couple of major countries, as well as a long list of others, including Switzerland, Germany, Canada, London and more. However, Yelp estimated that more than 95 percent of their employees expect to use Duo Push notifications, as it provides an easy user experience.
When it came to deployment, integrating Duo proved to be the easiest deployment they had ever done, according to Leichtling. Deployment took less than a day’s work for a single Yelp network engineer. They took a phased approach to deployment, starting with their security team members, then moving on to executives. With the help of Duo’s admin user interface, they were able to provision all of their teams via batch enrollment. After their engineers enrolled, they checked usage weeks later and found it was much higher than they had anticipated.
Yelp’s security team found a fast, easy and versatile solution to effectively secure their networks with Duo Security; creating great experiences for both administrators and users alike.
