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Cisco Umbrella pros and cons

Vendor: Cisco

4.4 out of 5

122 reviews
97% willing to recommend

Pros & Cons summary

Cisco Umbrella enhances security with DNS layer protection, blocking threats and offering centralized management. Its integration supports remote browser isolation and provides insights through reporting and threat intelligence. It scales well for growing needs, ensuring reliable protection. Although requiring technical expertise for customization and having high pricing, it lacks third-party tool integration and detailed reporting. Improvements are needed in technical support efficiency and connectivity with other platforms.

Buyer's Guide

Get pricing advice, tips, use cases and valuable features from real users of this product.

Prominent pros & cons

PROS

Cisco Umbrella provides dependable DNS security and malware protection.

It integrates smoothly with existing infrastructure, offering a comprehensive security suite.

The implementation and setup of Cisco Umbrella are straightforward and quick.

It offers robust reporting and insight into DNS requests and security threats.

Cisco Umbrella benefits organizations through DNS-based security and enhanced threat intelligence.

CONS

There are concerns about unclear and changing licensing, which can be a barrier for some users.

The integration process is considered complex and lacks seamless connectivity with third-party solutions.

The support system requires improvement in efficiency and responsiveness.

There are demands for improved integration with Cisco Secure Firewall and other Cisco products.

Concerns exist regarding the high pricing structure, especially in markets outside the USA.

Cisco Umbrella Pros review quotes

SA

Syed Ali Wajahat

IT Solution Architect at Dimension Data

Aug 12, 2019

It will protect, give you more robustness, and faster responses, compared to any firewalls or any of the proxy web servers.

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Network Planning Associate at a manufacturing company with 1,001-5,000 employees

Aug 5, 2022

Umbrella, being one pane for managing, being all-encompassing, allows us to quickly go in, make a change, and it applies to either every location, if we want it to, or we can have policies in place that only apply to certain users or certain computers.

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VG

Director of Security

Jul 21, 2022

Any time someone went off the network, the AnyConnect client had the Umbrella agent built in, and it would realize when their computer connected that they were not on the corporate network. It would monitor and they would have pretty close to the same rules that they had to follow when they were in the office, regarding what kind of website browsing they could do.

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IT Operations Manager at a manufacturing company with 201-500 employees

Aug 2, 2022

I was able to implement it myself. It was really easy to install. You could install it on a server locally if you want to. If you have the biggest site, you would do that, but for my site, it was just directing all the traffic out through the Cisco Umbrella DNS. It was really handy. When the owners of the company went overseas, I knew that they would be secure because even if they were not on the company network, they would still go through the Cisco Umbrella servers. It was a complete solution for protecting the company with outgoing data.

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SC

Network Security Architect at Lake Trust Credit Union

Aug 5, 2022

The single-pane-of-glass management is very important. We have a very small team. We can't spend a lot of time going from product to product to product to either investigate or set up policy. We need to have one place that we can go to and set everything up.

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Senior Network Architect at Prosperity247

Mar 30, 2023

The feature that we find most valuable is to be able to filter out those web requests that you don't want.

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Alfonso Reimunde

Independent Business Owner at Practical Information Systems

Dec 4, 2022

The most valuable feature is the ability to filter malware sites that could infect clients or allow them to download infected files.

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Director Of Information Technology at a financial services firm with 11-50 employees

May 26, 2022

When we have laptops that leave the building, they could connect to public WiFi before they establish a VPN connection back into the company. For that duration or that period of time when they're not docked in the network or on a VPN, they effectively don't have that full layer of security that I provide inside the building. This tool stands in during that period of time, and we extend the security settings through their basic firewall or their cloud-based firewall at that time. So, we do content filtering and control access, but they also are looking at new domains, IP addresses, and bad requests. They're blocking them on my behalf when a laptop is not sitting behind our security appliances.

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Principal Security Consultant at Vohkus

Mar 30, 2023

Cisco Umbrella's integration with other solutions has been a great feature in terms of ease of administration. Administration and troubleshooting are faster. The single pane of glass is great as well. Another great feature of Cisco Umbrella is remote browser isolation. With this feature, you open a virtual browser, and it's seamless to the user. If the user ends up going to a bad website that's passed a policy and something bad tries to download, it will not download into the machine because it is a virtual window somewhere in the cloud. You are protected by this feature.

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KS

Kevin Slaughter

Network Administrator

Aug 5, 2022

A single pane of glass saves time... This does have a lot of options available for us to see who's doing what, what trends, what errors. We can set up our alerting through it as well. It is definitely a great dashboard.

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Cisco Umbrella Cons review quotes

SA

Syed Ali Wajahat

IT Solution Architect at Dimension Data

Aug 12, 2019

It would be useful if they had a malware protection engine running inside their own VM.

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Network Planning Associate at a manufacturing company with 1,001-5,000 employees

Aug 5, 2022

In my experience with Umbrella support, sometimes the response times take a bit more time than we would like... sometimes, if you go through email, it can take quite a while to get a response.

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VG

Director of Security

Jul 21, 2022

The design of the screens could be improved. Sometimes you're trying to look for information, for what you think is critical that should be on that first screen of the dashboard so that you can quickly take screenshots to have people help out, but you have to hop between screens to find little pieces of evidence.

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IT Operations Manager at a manufacturing company with 201-500 employees

Aug 2, 2022

It had the ability to do a lot of app control. So, every single app that went through that portal was registered, but there is a general issue with the whole app control. As soon as you add a mobile phone to your network, all of the apps get registered through the system, and you can approve, reject, or just let them go through. When I looked at it, it was impossible to manage app control. There was just so much data. I didn't apply that service because I just didn't have the time to manage it. It would be good if there was a way to categorize applications.

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SC

Network Security Architect at Lake Trust Credit Union

Aug 5, 2022

The only thing I can think of is that I'd like to see a little more flexibility in policy creation. The way that policy is currently structured is like a "first hit succeeds" kind of policy. It would be nice if it were more hierarchical.

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Senior Network Architect at Prosperity247

Mar 30, 2023

With any Cisco product, it's the licensing side of things that needs improvement.

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Alfonso Reimunde

Independent Business Owner at Practical Information Systems

Dec 4, 2022

The rule-making process for blocking sites or for blocking characteristics can use some simplification.

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Director Of Information Technology at a financial services firm with 11-50 employees

May 26, 2022

There are a couple of interface issues. I know that they say that there are feature enhancements that are noted. For example, we've got the Cisco Meraki security appliances, and there, we geofence our company to where we're allowed to send and receive traffic. So, in our case, by default, we only allow traffic to six different countries, which allows us to effectively prevent traffic for the majority of bad players in the world, but they don't give you an easy way to do that in Cisco Umbrella. With Cisco Meraki, I can specify or pick the countries. I can say that I want to only allow traffic from these six countries, and I'm done. With Cisco Umbrella, I have to rely on the fact that they're going to prevent traffic to other countries. They're going to decide if it's good or bad.

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Principal Security Consultant at Vohkus

Mar 30, 2023

I would like to see more integrations with more products. Some of the integrations need to be simpler as well. For example, the integration with Cisco Secure Firewall could be simpler. It would be good to make reporting simpler. For those who don't use SecureX, it would be good to make Umbrella really simple to use upfront. It's not a difficult product, but it can be daunting for someone who isn't exposed to it because there are so many options.

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KS

Kevin Slaughter

Network Administrator

Aug 5, 2022

Something on our end that might make it better is alerting going to our ticketing system. It's not something that we have discussed, but that would be a proactive option for us to provide a learning experience for the staff.

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