Cisco Umbrella Reviews

We primarily use the solution as cloud security for our branches. It protects us from direct internet outbreaks.

It makes for good flexibility. The solution is very easy to manage. We found the initial setup, for example, to be quite simple.

Easy to deploy.

Efficient protection on the DNS level and even higher. The sandboxing feature analyse and handle the complicated security risks.

The product can be pretty expensive.

I've been using the solution for two to three years at this point.

We haven't faced any issues. There aren't bugs or glitches. It doesn't crash or freeze. We find Cisco to be reliable.

We have a variety of customers. The number of users on each umbrella varies from one to a few thousand. Most companies may just have a few hundred users. It's basically suitable for companies of all sizes. It scales well, in that sense. 

The Cisco Umbrella IT operation resource needs are equal for a large and small company. (no need to hire more engineers or operators)

Overall, the scalability is excellent. It's quite flexible.

While I have been in touch with Cisco technical support in the past (and they've been quite good), for Umbrella, I find I don't need any support.

I've dealt with other products on a different scale. I'd say that Cisco Umbrella is far and away much better than the other cloud security products on the market.

The initial setup was not complex. It was pretty straightforward. We found it to be rather easy, from beginning to end.

The deployment times vary and depend on which Umbrella you use. However, we've found it should only take about a day to get up and running. An IT team can manage it. They don't necessarily need an integrator.

The solution doesn't really require too much maintenance. You probably wouldn't need a dedicated person to maintain it.

We are integrators ourselves, however, the initial setup is so straightforward, typically an in-house IT team can manage a setup.

The solution is costly. It doesn't come cheap. The licensing also comes with additional costs for extra services (such as sandboxing feature, L3/L4 firewall, etc...).

We are Cisco partners. We have a business relationship with them.

We use various types of Umbrella. 

I'd recommend the solution. It's one of the best on the market and it works well in different environments. It's also extremely easy to deploy.

Overall, on a scale from one to ten, I'd rate it at a nine.

The various powerful query options are the most valuable features of this product to me. Using the Investigate API, we can gather the detailed history of a domain, whois information, NS records, etc. All of this information helps us determine whether a domain is malicious or not.

It helps us identify malicious domains.

I would be happy if they could add the whois information of an IP. That would further help us determine whether an IP is malicious or not by identifying the domains associated with the IP, whether there are any known bad domains associated with the IP, and more.

I have been using this solution for two months.

I did not encounter any issues with deployment, stability or scalability.

We implemented it in-house.

The APIs are very powerful. You can use any programming language and integrate it with your products. It can be really handy for security analysts.

OpenDNS allows us to maintain low network resource overhead on our (relatively) small network. Intuitive, flexible web filtering controls also help us enforce compliance over logically separated networks at our school for teachers, students, and non-academic staff.

Given the small to medium scale of our network architecture, our current gateway/firewall DMZ infrastructure is specced too low, and our budget too limited to accommodate more fully featured security appliances. While some organisations may utilise higher specced security appliances with powerful software features available directly on the device including user management, granular IP filtering and more, we must make do with lower spec appliances.

Furthermore, while our network is based around a gigabit fibre core, we have seen bandwidth utilisation increase greatly over the past several years due to cloud hybridisation of our infrastructure (AWS, Google Nearline, et.al.), and as a result are currently stretching the performance limits of what our current hardware stack can do. Given these limitations, the granular control which OpenDNS provides us for Web Content Filtering, malware protection and data logging are crucial in filling gaps in our network security stance.

To add, we are also an educational institution. Our standards for compliance, both internal and external, can be quite strict. We are beholden to security and compliance standards enforced by the Government of Japan, its Ministry of Education, as well as internal compliance enforced by our own Business Administration department.
This is not to mention the sort of 'soft compliance' which comes from the families of our students regarding how we handle sensitive data and personal records.

It has been our experience that the following features available within OpenDNS have helped us meet compliance reporting requirements quite readily:

• Botnet Protection
• Malware Protection
• Internet-Scale Malware/Botnet Protection- Phishing Protection
• Stats and Logs

The management interface for these features is highly user friendly and it is simple and easy to make configuration changes on the fly. This is important to us as specific security policies can and do change on a weekly or even daily basis. The size of our department also dictates that we do not have any single engineer dedicated to network security (or even networking) and so it is crucial that each of our members have the ability to log in and manage this service when needed.

All in all, I can not recommend OpenDNS as a one-size-fits-all solution for security and compliance, especially for larger organisations. I can, however, strongly recommend that any Systems and Network Engineering team consider this product on its merits regardless of scope. Personally speaking, this tool has proven itself invaluable in allowing myself and my team to perform our duties efficiently and securely.

Because we have a small sysadmin team, the less time we need to devote to responding to threats, parsing data logs and putting out fires, the better. OpenDNS saves us time in this regard, as well as providing fast and easy configuration control.

Difficult to answer as we haven't yet pushed the outer limits of what this product can do.

Nonetheless, one thing to keep in mind when using OpenDNS is how it will interact with your internal network and DNS architecture. You run the risk of breaking any local subnet DNS lookups in a domain-bound enterprise environment. While this criticism can be applied to other third-party DNS providers, it is nonetheless one reason for withholding a perfect rating.

Additionally, OpenDNS will handle server caching differently than your local service provider. This can cause service slowdown or interruptions, and generally prevents OpenDNS from becoming the "one-size-fits-all" solution that some would like it to be.

Finally, although this has never posed a problem in our environment specifically, OpenDNS has been known to grab NXDOMAIN records and redirect traffic to their own internal ad pages. Some people may find this unethical; however, that might depend upon whether you are utilising paid or unpaid services from OpenDNS as well.

I have been using for over a year.

We currently have OpenDNS deployed across two sites providing coverage to more than 500 active clients. No problems so far. We will be further expanding this year and hope to leverage OpenDNS web filtering at our new sites as well.

On the rare occasions we have used it, technical support has been prompt and professional, if a bit lacking in personal touch.

Previous infrastructure relied on router/gateway-installed software for filtering and security. It simply isn't enough for a modern network, especially not one as complicated and security-conscious as education.

With a basic understanding of networking, implementation should be straightforward. For non-technical people, there is probably enough documentation floating around that basic configuration is possible for anybody motivated enough.

An in-house team implemented it.

Implementation was a no-brainer. We do recommend notifying and educating users in advance of implementation to avoid potential headaches caused by sudden changes to filtering policies and such.

ROI for OpenDNS: time saved, checkboxes ticked, and organizational leadership satisfied.

Get a quote! You also need to weigh any licensing costs against potential risk factors. (I.e., what is the potential cost factor of not implementing this or other solutions?) OpenDNS licensing structure and policy is generally straightforward and easy to understand. In our case, managing a network in use by students, many of them younger, necessitates certain compliance and security implementations not found in typical corporate environments.

Plan out your security coverage and filtering strategy in advance of purchasing and implementation. Think about what role you expect OpenDNS to fill in your security architecture. Do you have Layer 3 security in place? Where do your vulnerabilities lie and what threats can you expect to counter?

We use this solution to provide Dorel filtering and security for our WiFi environment. I'm the chief enterprise architect and we are customers of Cisco Umbrella. 

The security and access control features are the most valuable for us.

Improvements could be made with the user interface, it could be a little smoother and more intuitive.

I've been using this solution for two years. 

The solution is very stable.

I have scaled it in other companies and it scales very well. It's got a UV, it's got a decent user interface so once you go to Cisco training, they offer it when you buy the product so that if you are a small business looking for something like Umbrella, you can set it and forget it and it works. You can also tie it into your WiFi solution.

Tech support at Cisco is great. Not just for this project. I've been working with Cisco equipment and Cisco tech for 25 years now and I've never had a problem with them.

The initial setup was relatively straightforward. We had an implementation strategy and it wasn't particularly difficult.

In general, Umbrella is a competitive solution for small or large enterprise. It's never the cheapest, but it's always in the competition, at least in my experience. I would recommend the solution, there's no reason not to go there, depending on your specific situation, of course. 

I would rate this solution an eight out of 10. 

We are using this product for DNS security that is integrated with Active Directory. We are also using public DNS connectivity for the filtering of underlying threats.

What we like most is security and how easy it is to integrate with other appliances.

The different levels of security, such as backend security and internet security, need improvement.

In the next release, I would like to see the integration of VDI NSX with Cisco Umbrella.

We have been using the entire Cisco Solution for three years.

In the two years that I have been using this product, it has been stable. We have not had problems.

It's a scalable solution.

My experience with technical support is that when you open a case, you get better support. I ordered a part and was told that it was not available. When I opened a case, it was better.

In addition to Cisco Umbrella, we are using Cisco Firepower. 

We use the entire Cisco solution that includes Cisco Umbrella, Cisco AMP for Endpoint, and Cisco Firepower.

The initial setup is easy. It took a day to deploy.

We use the entire Cisco solution and we are happy with the product integration.

I would rate this solution a nine out of ten.

The ability to use custom categories to block out websites was valuable because the predefined categories were either too restrictive or not restrictive enough. For example, one category would block everything from social media to webmail, while another category did not block either. So to be able to customize categories made it a lot easier.

This product has made it easier for our IT team to keep employees on track to work and away from distracting websites.

Perhaps an option to be able to block only specific users would be a way to improve the free version of OpenDNS. In our department, there are multiple users that need different levels of access. For example, those who work in the advertising department need access to social media, while those in the accounting department do not. The ability to be able to set different rules for each user would have been nice to have.

I have used it for about six months.

I did not encounter any stability issues.

I did not encounter any scalability issues.

I did not need to contact technical support when using OpenDNS. The product is very self-explanatory.

This was the first product we used for filtering websites.

The initial setup was very straightforward. I did not have any issues.

I was using the free version of OpenDNS, so I am not aware of the pricing.

We were choosing between pfSense and their packages versus. OpenDNS looked easier to setup, so we went for that first. Eventually, we moved to using pfSense’s SquidGuard, because it allows us to be more precise with filtering websites.

This product is very straightforward and simple to setup. I would recommend others to just give the product a try. I am sure they will be happy with the results. OpenDNS has different filtering levels, but I found it easier to just go for the custom level versus the ones they had set up already.

Our primary use case is security at the DNS level. This solutions was suggested by our account manager at Insight. 

we didn't implement it in our environment because of the pricing concern. however, I am sure it would have done a great job considering my observations in the trail pack.

Threats never come close to your network with security at the DNS level. Like i said above, i used it for a very short time so I cannot comment on the what would've been valuable for us but I was pretty amazed by the wide variety of security features and reports on a single dashboard. Leveraging Custom API and reasons and visibility for each deep visibility for the network was something that caught my eye.

There should be a way to monitor traffic at the user level. I use Meraki Dashboard and Cisco Firepower to do this for different networks. I understand this tool monitors the network as a whole but adding that information will let us cut the cost for other tools. 

The product is pricey compared to Cisco Firepower.

It is a pretty good product for a small business.

We use Cisco Umbrella for monitoring and more.

I like that it integrates with the infrastructure. I also like the kind of data and intelligence that's built-in. It helps create innovative reports for security. 

It could be more secure. It would be better if they provided a transferring proxy as an add-on and more integration.

I have been dealing with Cisco Umbrella for two and a half years.

Cisco Umbrella is a stable solution.

Cisco Umbrella is very scalable at the cloud level. All you have to do is increase the internet bandwidth and pay for the license. 

Technical support is excellent.

The initial setup was pretty straightforward. It was simple. 

The price depends on the use case, and it's a bit linear. But it depends on the customer's strategy and how Cisco plans to optimize the costs. 

I would recommend this solution to potential users.

On a scale from one to ten, I would give Cisco Umbrella a ten.