Cisco Umbrella Reviews

We use Umbrella to monitor user activity and make sure that our staff isn't clicking on malicious links. We also use it to protect us by being more proactive on links that are already known to cause harm or potential hacks. Overall, it's keeping everything in a safe box.

We had a lot of challenges with staff clicking on ad links, random Google search links. Most staff want to shop during the day or in their downtime and were clicking on random links and then causing potential network issues, bugs, and causing network downs. Umbrella has helped us limit that.

It has provided our organization with more stability. Even though staff would like to shop using certain links, it gives us the option to educate them: "Hey, some of these links, just don't click on those." We are pretty lenient. We understand people want to shop and do other things at work. We try to keep it work-related, but safe.

Everyone really just wants to be able to click and do what they do, just like at home. But for the IT side of it, it does benefit us by limiting all of the extra activity. It does give us some comfortability that we aren't going to wake up, or even come in in the afternoon, and the whole network is down because someone went to buy some shoes or they clicked on a malicious email and caused a chain reaction.

It's very important for our organization to support the hybrid workers because we're a health clinic. A lot of staff are going to be away, but with the COVID numbers still out there, we want to be able to provide the same support that we did before COVID. We want to give the same flexibility, the same availability to our patients, that we had in the past. Being remote or having hybrid, it does give us a different range of opportunities to implement different workflows. They can reach out with more telecommunication, more video conferencing, rather than having a patient drive out to a site to seek support. We can do remote assistance and, with Umbrella, it still gives us the opportunity to be secure through those communication links.

We don't really have metrics at this particular time for it, but just [anecdotally] from past troubleshooting, having to diagnose maybe five different areas, this saves us a lot of time and a lot of effort in isolating the actual issue. We can just open up Umbrella, go to the specific area that we feel is impacted, or just look at one of the key dashboards that are on the portal and identify the issue.

It's very easy to maintain network connectivity with Umbrella. Before, we were having a lot of issues, but since Umbrella has been implemented, we really haven't had to touch it. It's kind of self-sufficient.

The solution is a lot more proactive. It does have its own features where it constantly uploads known threats and blocks those. It takes a lot of the guesswork out of our environment, but it also gives us an opportunity, if there are some questionable links, to diagnose those without it impacting the environment.

The best feature is the visibility. We're able to see the specific user names of whoever clicked on a certain link. It also gives us a threat detection level. It allows us to maintain more [awareness of] who's doing what they shouldn't be doing. The most valuable asset of it is giving us the ability to categorize who should have access to what type of sites.

This solution does give us a single-pane-of-glass for this particular instance. We do have several products implemented that we manage, which this hasn't integrated with yet, but we have just been made aware of the SecureX implementation and we are looking into implementing that and bringing that into another single-pane-of-glass, but with more options available.

A single pane of glass saves time. It saves effort and the headache of having to open up multiple links and go to different dashboards for troubleshooting different areas. 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.

The dashboard, the single pane, is very helpful, it's very visual. Everything is straightforward there; it's definitely important for management. Even when we bring it to upper management and explain why this product is beneficial for us, this gives us a good breakdown and makes a lot of details available for us.

So far, I haven't seen any areas that need improvement. As far as what we need it to do, it's doing just that. It's comfortable for us. It's working beyond our expectations. 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.

We've had Umbrella implemented for about two years.

The stability is very great. Once it's deployed and you do your due diligence to make sure that everything is communicating and in sync, we've hardly had to touch it.

For our environment, it doesn't seem to have any issues with the amount of users and staff. We have been constantly growing since we deployed it without any impact. No negative impact is forecasted.

The support has been really good. I have only had to utilize support about three times. It's been more of a training area: "How do I get to this area?" and "What does this actually do? How can this benefit me?" From there, it still has been stable and smooth and doing everything that we expected it to do.

Positive

We had a different overall firewall solution, which was a Sophos firewall. But since we migrated away from that, we implemented the Firepower firewall and, in addition to that, added in Umbrella.

The reliability wasn't really there, with Sophos always having issues, even from the endpoint perspective. We had issues across the board and it was management's decision to look into a new solution.

We just did one deployment through a virtual machine and that manages all of our routers and all of our users. We haven't had to do multi-site configurations or deployments. It goes towards the organization, uploads all of our users, and all of our statistics, and maintains things from there.

I'm not sure of the actual cost that went into it, but it's definitely a productive product for us.

The solution doesn't require almost any maintenance, unless you're doing triple checks, upgrades, or just being proactive in different areas. But for the most part, once it's deployed, you just give it about a week or two to check your levels and make sure everything is the way that you intend the product to work.

As far as the IT infrastructure team goes, we're all happy with the product. It definitely takes a lot of load off of our plate. We don't have to deal with certain sites being blocked. We have been able to set expectations, where these particular users have access to these types of sites, and certain sites are just blocked. That's just the company standard. From the staff perspective, they want to be able to browse freely, but we were able to set those expectations and guidelines and that we're working in the best interests of the site.

I'll rate it a 10 out of 10. It's been functioning very efficiently and effectively, and it's doing everything we need it to do. It takes a lot of load off of our team.

As a Cisco partner, try to test things on our own before we position the product to our customers or educate partners on it. So, the primary use case was to test things out and to be our own first customer. We started using it internally for our own purposes to secure our access to the internet with Umbrella.

We use Cisco Umbrella to secure internet connectivity and especially to focus on the threats introduced through web browsing. This is because most of the applications the workers use are browser-based.

The traffic, by default, is typically encrypted with HPS, and we use Cisco Umbrella to get more insight into that traffic. The classical security appliances have very low visibility into them. This is where we see Cisco Umbrella have the most traction.

In general, it increases the security level. It helps us prevent threats from being accessed. Also, the visibility into internet bounce traffic is increased. So, in general, it increases the overall internet security of the organization.

One valuable feature is definitely its simplicity in terms of deployment. It is very easy to integrate it into the environment without any heavy lifting. Users didn't notice that we implemented it. You can start with a very low monitoring mode and start observing what Cisco Umbrella sees.

In terms of helping workers feel safe, secure, supported, and included, the solution is pretty transparent to the end user in most cases. They don't necessarily get any confidence from it, but it's supposed to be that way. It's supposed to be as transparent as possible. However, when the end-user accesses a site that is blacklisted or treated as potentially suspicious, he or she will see a warning displayed. This gives them additional confidence that somebody else is taking care of the details and that they can confidently browse around. If they come across a suspicious site, they know that they will get a warning or advice on how to proceed.

Cisco Umbrella supporting hybrid work environments is important. Within our organization, even before COVID, a lot of us worked remotely from time to time. For companies that we work with, it has become a reality with COVID. Before, everybody was working on site, and now, that's no longer the case. It is important to have flexibility and know that even if we work from home or from another place we're still secure.

For all Umbrella-related things, it does provide single-pane-of-glass management, but it's one component. If I look at the typical employee, he is only one piece of the puzzle. Other solutions, like, for example, AnyConnect for remote access, are managed separately. For Umbrella-specific items, it's a single interface for management. For monitoring, policies, and troubleshooting a specific case, everything is in one place. I don't need to go through the logs to know where to look.

My organization is not very large, and I'd say my colleagues are pretty proficient. So, it's not a high priority to have single-pane-of-glass management, but it's always good if solutions are capable of integrating together. If by enabling single-pane-of-glass management the workflow is simplified and the day-to-day operations are a little easier, then that's something we definitely want to benefit from.

The administrator user experience is definitely optimized by single-pane-of-glass management, especially if the personnel are busy. Then, it helps if all the relevant details are in one place.

In terms of maintaining network connectivity, Umbrella on its own is pretty user-friendly. It is easy to set up and maintain. It's one of its strong suits.

For the branch and campus, it's very simple to apply and maintain network connectivity. For the home environments, there are options to integrate it into the employee's PC as well. Cisco Umbrella supports different methods for different environments so that you can achieve the level of implementation that you need. It's where it should be.

It's very efficient in securing the infrastructure from end to end so that we can detect and remediate threats. You can simply adopt it right into the environment, and you don't need to build the rule sets on your own. It utilizes best practices, and it's very easy to set up policies such as potential malicious categories on the internet, what you want to block, what you want to filter out, etc. It's very easy to implement those.

When you go through the reports, you can see what kind of threats were blocked. Luckily, we haven't had an incident where something got through and caused a security incident.

In terms of metrics on how Cisco Umbrella has been able to remediate threats, the numbers look pretty impressive. However, it's hard to assess how serious that potential threat really was. It's hard to put actual weight on the numbers to determine how meaningful those numbers are.

The value that resilience helps offer in cyber security is pretty high. Cyber security resilience is a high priority in our organization. It's important to our customers that we handle what we do for them in a secure manner.

I'd like to see this solution more closely integrate with other products Cisco has in its portfolio.

I would also like to be able to manage the identities, for example. If you define them in ISE, it would be good to be able to use the same identities also within Umbrella. It would simplify the use of multiple products within the organization from the same vendor.

I've been using it for about three years now.

Stability-wise, Cisco Umbrella is pretty robust. The uptime statistics are very high. There are, generally, no issues with stability.

Our organization isn't very large, but it's pretty scalable for larger organizations. At the moment, it's not a limiting factor.

Technical support is one of Cisco's strong suits. In my experience, the Umbrella team has been very quick to turn around requests. It's even been above average by Cisco's standard compared to the turnaround time for other Cisco solutions and products.

I would give Cisco's support a rating of nine on a scale from one to ten.

Positive

We deployed it by configuring local devices to redirect the DNS request to the SAS service Umbrella provides.

The solution is cloud-based. You just send your DNS request or your traffic to it. You can start with a monitoring-only mode. So for example, you can redirect the DNS request and start observing what Umbrella recognizes. Later, you can start defining the policies, setting up the enforcements, etc. You can very quickly get to the first results.

Actual ROI numbers are really hard to measure and determine. Generally, we see that customers who implement Cisco Umbrella and start using it tend to renew their licenses. They adopt the product, and they recognize the value it brings. I think this shows that there was a return of investment for them and that it achieved the desired level.

Licensing with Cisco can be a little complex, but I think it's comparable with that of other similar products. It's always hard to put a price on security, but the price is fair for the value it provides.

We're a Cisco partner, and we work with a lot of Cisco solutions. So, it was pretty easy for us to decide what we wanted to try and test. We didn't really do competitive selection and assessment, and it was pretty straightforward for us to go with Umbrella.

I would rate Cisco Umbrella at nine on a scale from one to ten.

I deployed it as an end-user management solution in a large IT practice, and for our end-users to have secure internet access. I've also advised on it as a consultant for companies wanting to use it to deploy SASE-type solutions.

It's really hard to have a firewall everywhere. It's also really hard to have somebody follow a user on the internet and make sure that they're doing things securely. Having a tool that's on an endpoint that you know is always connected and always pushing people to the right locations, avoiding redirects and malicious intent, has been the biggest benefit for us.

We were exposed to ransomware attacks at a very early stage in our company. Cisco Umbrella is one of the ways that we have found to help prevent ransomware attacks. It also helps prevent users from going to places that they shouldn't be going to, beyond just firewalls and email security. It is an extra level of protection that really helps make us feel comfortable at night.

The fact that Cisco Umbrella helps support hybrid work is really the key, having an endpoint protected wherever it is, whether it's on or off your network. That's what everybody on the planet is looking for right now.

It has also, 100 percent, helped us remediate threats more quickly.

The most valuable thing is how easy it is to deploy. We did it with 9,000 users at my last job, and it took a week to get to all the endpoints. Doing that without having to physically touch all those endpoints was very simple. 

The single pane of glass management makes it very easy to manage your rollout. We get a lot of "single panes of glass" and, eventually, you need a pane of panes of glass. But it's always good to have a clear and graphical view, and Umbrella's is nice and easy to read. Definitely, of the panes of glass that we do have, it's one of the easiest to use.

The single pane of glass is good to group users together and separate people out. Some people need different types of security. Some people are more vulnerable. Some have more highly valuable assets, like C-suite people. It's really good to be able to have end-users defined inside of that. You don't have to jump around. You don't have to figure out who's who. It's all done through one pane of glass.

What most people don't realize is that it's running in the background, which is a really nice aspect when it comes to security. Often, when you deploy a security tool, it takes up CPU performance. Everything slows to a grind. But Umbrella is so simple and easy and it doesn't affect the end-user experience. It's the best of all worlds. It's nice when people realize that they're being protected when they go to the wrong site. I think people are happy that they're protected, but it's nice that they rarely notice it.

It's generally easy to maintain network connectivity, but with Umbrella, the nice part is that whichever connectivity you're on, you're always secure. With Umbrella, as long as you're online, you're going to be protected.

I'd like to see improvement in its overall integration with all the other platforms. There's some integration between Umbrella and Meraki, but an overall Cisco problem is that there are so many different tools, and finding easy, seamless ways of connecting everything together is always a challenge. Always, with Cisco tools, there is the issue of finding ways to have fewer windows to look at and how to make those tools work together better.

I have been using Cisco Umbrella for over six years.

It's a cloud service. Beyond the actual tool working, the most important thing is its availability.

As long as the internet connectivity is up, I've never had a problem with Umbrella not being there. It's a tool that we have never been concerned will go down while our internet connectivity is up.

Security always has to be there. As long as your security tools are available, that's when you can be the most secure. With Umbrella, especially, we have never had an issue where it was out and we needed protection. It's probably one of the most resilient tools available on the planet. For sure, it's amazing.

I'm sure there are bigger customers than us, but we had 9,000 endpoints secured in a month's time without a blip in the system or in performance. For us, it has been impressive.

Meraki and Umbrella support are great. We have never had an issue with Umbrella, so we haven't had to evaluate support there. But whenever we have had issues with the integration between Meraki and Umbrella, Meraki support has been amazing.

Positive

We did not have a previous solution.

It was pretty straightforward. We loaded the client into Meraki Systems Manager, and then we were able to push it to all devices inside our network that had Systems Manager. It was pretty much three clicks.

We had full Meraki stacks as most of our network deployment. We were 100 percent cloud on our solutions. Umbrella sits in between our on-premises networks or between our users at home and between our cloud applications that we use at our clinic and office locations.

We did it in-house.

The return is that you don't get breached. It's a hard thing to quantify because if you don't get breached, you don't know what the value of that breach would have been. By not being breached and by being able to mitigate ransomware attacks, there is definitely return on investment.

The pricing is great and very competitive with the rest of the market. 

With everything to do with security, you should never worry about price because it's all about risks. The cost of $20 to $30 a license for Umbrella might protect you from $4 to $5 million worth of ransomware. It depends on your risk profile.

We evaluated Zscaler as well. The difference between Zscaler and Umbrella was that Umbrella was a lot simpler to deploy and a lot easier to manage. Zscaler requires way more customization and it has some slightly different use cases than Umbrella. For us, Umbrella was more what we were looking for and generally easier for us to manage.

For C-suites that want more security resilience in their organizations, I would tell them to adopt cloud technologies as much as they can. Try to find things that will help you scale because, when you keep things on-premises, you have to be the cloud provider yourself. Tools that other people have already stretched across, and on whose service you can rely, are generally going to be better than what you can do yourself. Either that or it's going to be very expensive for you to provide that service in-house.

Umbrella is probably one of the best tools out there in all the security landscape. It's very valuable to all people who are looking to deploy secure internet access. Everything has been perfect as far as we have used it.

One of our purposes for acquiring Umbrella was to block phishing links that we get in emails and to manage risky websites. We're using it for our internal network and the roaming client for external users.

Blocking malicious websites and preventing users from going into them, as well as the phishing attacks that usually come with malicious links, were the challenges. With Umbrella we can block them.

We use it in our Active Directory domain and for about 175 users. We use it on desktop computers and on laptops for external users. It's all on-premises, protecting servers and workstations.

It has improved our company a lot because we now see where the users are going and prevent them from going to malicious websites. It has reduced, by a lot, the chances of hackers getting into our organization.

With Umbrella, it's our IT staff who we feel secure. Sometimes the end-users, our clients, don't fully understand the purpose of the tools when we install them, such as the roaming client. And sometimes they get false positives and they don't fully understand why. But for us, as IT admins, we feel a lot more comfortable with the tool in place, because we know that it's unlikely our users will go to a malicious website. Umbrella is protecting us.

Umbrella has also helped us remediate threats more quickly. It's really good for securing our infrastructure from end to end. Umbrella's footprint is really small. If you want to secure infrastructure, such as servers, you don't have to install an agent. You just have to use DNS forwarders and point them to the umbrella servers. That's easier. It helps us protect our infrastructure for sure.

The Global Block List is one of the most valuable features because it's really easy to block domain names as well as URLs. Sometimes you don't want to block the whole site, you just want to block one URL. The Global Block and Allow Lists are the best features for us.

Cisco Umbrella also provides a single pane of glass for management. It's really helpful and it's important for us because we have multiple locations. Without a single pane of glass, if you want to block websites you have to go to every location, in each firewall, one by one. But when you have a single management portal, it's a lot easier.

The user experience is good because, as IT and admins, it's easy to use. But that's not only for admins, it's also true for the clients because they know the reason a website is blocked. The user experience is pretty smooth because they can report a false positive or a malicious website that has not been blocked in Umbrella. We are happy with the user experience.

And when it comes to applying and maintaining network connectivity consistently across all workplaces, Umbrella is excellent. We can track, among the different locations that we have, where the users are trying to get to. That means the risk of disruption is reduced by using Umbrella. And in that way, Umbrella contributes to maintaining network connectivity.

The user interface is pretty nice. Once you know how to do tasks, it's easy.

There are some situations where we would like to block things for specific user groups. I know that Umbrella does that, but it's not that easy. When you go to the Global Allow and Block Lists, that's the easy part. But when you want a specific task for specific rules and policies for user groups, you have to go three levels down in the menu, and it's hard to find where you do that task.

Also, the policies are not that easy to manage.

I have been using Cisco Umbrella for around a year and a half.

The stability is really good. They have about 99.99 percent uptime. I can't think of a significant disruption in the service.

We are a small organization, but from what I have seen, it is very scalable.

We have never requested support.

The initial deployment was straightforward.

The solution is on-premises but the management is cloud-based.

We did it all by ourselves.

We have seen return on investment by reducing the risk we had in the past. That has saved us from having to invest a lot of time in support, which is something we had to do when a user didn't know what they were doing and got infected. We now spend less time on end-user support.

The pricing is pretty fair. It's good.

In my former company, we used Area 1 for DNS protection, not Umbrella. I knew OpenDNS before it became Umbrella. In fact, I used OpenDNS for my personal accounts. In my current company we evaluated Area 1, but in the end, we loved Cisco's support and that is one of the reasons we went with Umbrella. But, obviously, the features in Umbrella are pretty good.

Once our end-users understood why we use Umbrella, that it was for improving our organization's security, it improved their morale. Nowadays, they are aware of cyber threats and they know that Umbrella is one of the tools that we use to prevent a breach. They feel more secure now.

Resilience helps a lot in cyber security. One of the things that makes Umbrella great is that you don't have to detect threats by yourself. Wherever in the world a new threat is detected, it's in the Global Block List of Umbrella and we don't have to manage those threats one by one.

That kind of resilience is more and more important for our organization every day. Fortunately, our C-level now understands the risks and what the organization could lose. They understand the impact. With the support of management, cyber security is really important for our organization.

I would tell the leaders of other organizations who want to build more resilience that cyber security is more important now because we are serving our internal and external customers. The problem with a cyber security risk, a threat or a disruption in IT services, is that it will probably cause us to stop producing what we produce. Our customers will have a bad experience, and that means it is not only a financial issue but one of reputation. I would tell such leaders to always keep cyber security in mind because it's not just about your IT guys, it's for the whole organization.

It's an excellent product. It has worked really well. The only reason I don't give it a 10 out of 10 is, as I mentioned, that there are some tasks that could be done more easily.

We use Cisco Umbrella as a security layer for all our employees. We deployed it two years ago as a security solution in order to cover our roaming workforce. Our employees are scattered throughout more than 20 locations, including homes and hotspots, and we had to cover the security gap. We needed to be sure that regardless of the location our employees would be covered by the security features.

To provide connectivity to our members, we use Cisco Meraki. When our employees are within the co-working space, we use the integration with Cisco Umbrella security and the Meraki network.

The reports and notifications are the most useful part of the platform. As soon as you deploy the security layers, the reporting is very comprehensive. It helps you to have, at a glance, a clear view of what's going on.

The integration between Cisco Secure solutions is pretty good. We have been able to deliver the solution in a few days. The integration of Umbrella and Meraki is literally one click away from the customer.

One of the reasons why we chose Umbrella was its capability to perform end-to-end detection of malware and web traffic. In the last two years, we have been covered, detection has been faster, and we have been able to contain some potential threats along the way. We use the Umbrella stack from DNS protection to web and content protection. Our workforce is made up of 150 Macs; thus, we use Mac as a client. We have some PCs and integration with the network in our co-working spaces.

Utilizing Cisco Secure has helped us save time. Being a nimble organization, we don't have IT staff who are fully dedicated to security. The maintenance is also not very time-consuming. In terms of the amount of time saved, it would be half an FTE a year, given the fact that we are informed and notified when threats arise.

In terms of operating expenditures, we have been able to negotiate a better cyber insurance rate with our insurance company due to the fact that we are covered by Umbrella.

Another benefit of using Cisco Umbrella is application scanning. We have been able to understand how many other applications we were consuming in the cloud, address them, and save money. Without Cisco Umbrella, we would not have realized that we had so many cloud applications in the company.

We have been able to close at least four or five applications that were duplicates of others that we were already using in the company. We have realized approximately 10,000 to 12,000 euros a year of immediate savings in an organization of 150 people, which is quite significant.

Client delivery and client updates should be improved. Client delivery was not as easy as expected. Another area for improvement is the integration of escalation procedures for security issues.

In the next release, I would like to see the addition of notification flows like SMS and popups.

Cisco Umbrella is stable. We have had some issues, for example, when deploying from home or from slow networks, but 99% might be covered by a backup deployment of the client.

The moment Cisco Umbrella is installed, it scales. It's a matter of deploying policies. You can scale from one to thousands or tens of thousands of clients very quickly.

We are mainly supported by our partner. We escalate to Cisco's technical support when needed, and they are always outstanding. I would rate them at ten out of ten.

Positive

In my environment, the initial deployment was not as easy as we expected it to be. The delivery of the client in a Mac environment was not that easy, and the fact that we do not have a directory made things a bit more complicated. On the other hand, as soon as we were able to deliver the client, everything went well. We were able to deploy the solution in one week.

We were supported by our partner both on the network side and the security side. Being a solution focused on the client, we involved the partner for support on the endpoints, which are the critical part of the delivery.

Our experience working with our partner was good because they know our organization and our needs. When you increase security, you may see a higher number of false positives. Our partner played a key role resolving any issues that arose for the customer during deployment.

Cisco Umbrella is not a cheap product. However, it's not a matter of the cost; it's more a matter of the value of security. It is easy to measure this value when you have a security incident. I think the price is a good trade-off for a product that can help you avoid security threats.

You can try to partner as much as you can with insurance and other companies. It can help you reduce acquisition costs.

We had several reasons for choosing Cisco Umbrella, including the rise in attacks, the need to be careful with our customers' information, and our desire to have an extra layer of information security.

The main reason for going with Cisco Umbrella versus other competing solutions was its capability to integrate with our network. The first deployment we did was pure DNS and was a client deployment. Then, we were sure that we wanted to have a deeper integration. The fact that we are 100% running on Meraki infrastructure helped us to have this blended architecture, which is very efficient from the point of view of the client, service, and security.

If you're considering Cisco Umbrella, my advice would be to take your time and have 10% to 20% of your company pilot the solution. It's a solution that is easy to pilot in a specific environment, even with very deep integration with the network. I would advise you to go with a good use case, pilot the solution, and then move forward with a broader deployment.

On a scale from one to ten, I would rate Cisco Umbrella at nine.

We started using the standard version of the Cisco Umbrella to upgrade to a newer version last year.

As a company with a global presence spanning over 110 countries, Cosentino requires a uniform security solution that can ensure the safety of its users. Our search for an ideal solution led us to seek one that was easily deployable, integrated seamlessly with our existing systems, and offered robust protection. After thorough market research, we found that Umbrella was the most suitable solution for our needs.

Cisco Umbrella has notably enhanced the perception of security among our users. The solution is seamless and transparent for them to use, and they feel protected at all times. This makes it an excellent solution for users in terms of their experience. Additionally, as mentioned earlier, the quick deployment time is critical for our organization, and Umbrella has significantly improved it.

Cisco Umbrella is an ideal product for our organization because it is a standardized solution that can be implemented uniformly across the entire organization. It adheres to industry standards and provides the same high level of security to all users, regardless of their location or role within the organization. This consistency in security measures ensures that every user in the organization is protected to the same degree.

Thanks to the standardized solution offered by Cisco Umbrella, our IT staff has been able to focus on other projects. Once deployed, we no longer have to worry about security in that particular area. The solution is easy to deploy and seamlessly integrated with our infrastructure, making our lives much easier in this regard. Overall, it has significantly reduced the burden on our IT staff and allowed them to focus on other critical projects.

Cisco Umbrella has enabled us to consolidate our various tools and applications by providing comprehensive security coverage for our users, whether they are working in our office or remotely from home. With Cisco Umbrella, we can address all our security needs related to browsing and network security. While it's not mandatory, we have eliminated the need for most physical firewalls worldwide by leveraging Cisco Umbrella's capabilities. This solution has proved to be a game-changer for us, as it simplifies the deployment process significantly, as previously discussed.

The primary advantage of Cisco Umbrella is its ability to safeguard our users no matter where they are working from - whether it's in the office or remotely, as per the new work model that has emerged globally. This integrated security solution has simplified our lives by combining all the necessary security measures in one product. Additionally, deploying the product is all it takes to protect all our users.

Although Cisco Umbrella has an excellent global network footprint, there is still room for improvement and growth in this area. Additionally, there are bandwidth limitations associated with the connectors that need to be addressed. To be a viable solution for larger offices, Cisco Umbrella must continue to expand and improve its capabilities in these areas.

I have used Cisco Umbrella for approximately four years.

Cisco Umbrella has generally been a stable solution for us, although we have encountered some issues with the new connectors. Currently, we are experiencing some minor problems with disconnections or other issues, but these occurrences have been infrequent.

While the solution is currently scalable, we recognize the need to continue expanding our connection points and bandwidth in order to accommodate future growth.

The support provided by Cisco Umbrella is excellent. In addition to the standard support included with the product, we have also opted for an additional support layer provided directly by Cisco. We have been extremely pleased with the level of service we have received thus far.

While there are areas where improvements could be made, such as the RMA process, overall we are satisfied with the level of service provided by Cisco Umbrella.

I rate the support from Cisco Umbrella an eight out of ten.

Positive

Deploying Cisco Umbrella proved to be a hassle-free experience for us. Since our SD-WAN is based on Cisco Meraki products, integrating Cisco Umbrella with Cisco Meraki was an effortless process. This integration has enabled us to implement the first SASE solution in our organization, and the combined solution of Cisco Umbrella and Cisco Meraki has helped us to set up new offices in less than 30 days, which is a significant improvement compared to the five to six months it used to take us earlier. This has led to a remarkable enhancement in our deployment speed, which is truly amazing.

Calculating the return on investment for a security solution is a challenging task, as it can be difficult to measure. While we have not performed a formal assessment of the return on our Umbrella implementation, I am confident that it has yielded a favorable outcome for our organization.

The licensing and pricing structure of Cisco Umbrella is in line with standard systems on the market, and we have no specific requirements in this area. Overall, we have found it to be an acceptable pricing model for our organization.

One of the main reasons we chose to implement Umbrella over its competitors was due to its extensive global network footprint, which closely matched our own footprint at Cosentino. Additionally, Umbrella's user-friendly interface was preferred by our users over other solutions, making it a more appealing option overall.

My advice to others would be to ensure that the Cisco Umbrella footprint aligns with the organization's needs. This is a crucial factor in ensuring that the product works well for the company.

I rate Cisco Umbrella a nine out of ten.

My main goal with Cisco Umbrella is to ensure protection for my users, regardless of their location. Additionally, the solution provides a positive user experience and is overall a great product.

We have deployed an on-prem virtual appliance for Active Directory (AD) and user mapping. We have integrated our AD with it as well as all the pre-reqs that come with it.

It is a DNS solution. It stops us at the first layer of Layer 7, stopping at the DNS level. It just removes the burden for opening a connection, then looking at the firewalls and all the parameter devices. It has a single pane of glass that keeps you secure.

It has helped us in terms of the roaming client. That has helped us in terms of security. Whereas, previously the roaming client was bothering us, which got us into this solution. That has helped the end user with laptops and devices for different sites. This keeps us secure at all times wherever they go.

We are not using a DNS solution, but we have been using the firewalls and all the proxy firewalls instead, which has really helped us since we now know that the entire network environment is being secured by Umbrella. It gives us a real pat on the back that we are being backed by the Talos cloud and its security. We are monitoring in real-time. It works by itself to assess all the security features and parameters through Talos, which is really interesting and good for our environment.

The most valuable features are actually the reporting with all the visibility. It gives a hawk-eye view when we map AD with Umbrella. It gives us the visibility of every user, e.g., which sites and content are being used and who is accessing what. That has really been a good new addition for me.

We don't need to access multiple devices in order to give access to our internal resources. We are secured in having everything on a single pane of glass, which keeps us secure as well. We can enter the configuration to reach our destinations based on the main names. Other than that, it also secures us by not looking at only the destination, but also the predefined security parameters that Cisco Umbrella has provided. For example, if I coded command and control centers (CNCs), then most phishing websites, where there are known websites caught by Talos, are being categorized as the bad domain. That is where it gives us a nice, handy lift.

The single-pane-of-glass management is really important. In today's era, administration costs and operational expenses will cost you a lot, and it reduces that as well. You don't need extra resources to manage all your parameter firewalls, looking at every single device to allow resources internal access. By just introducing the single-pane-of-glass management, it has lifted the burden off of management, especially the network management.

It gives us a quick view into what we are looking at. We don't need to go to the different devices and see where our traffic is starving, etc. So, we have better visibility, when using Umbrella, from its single pane of glass.

We faced an issue regarding virtual appliances (VAs) during deployment. They could improve the quality and management of the virtual appliances offered right now. You can't see much because it is a Linux machine, and they have customized it. You don't have any route access to the machine, only seeing limited things in it. When we opened a ticket, they didn't know much about VAs themselves. So, that is where it is lacking right now. I know this will improve in the long run.

I have been using it for seven or eight months.

We used support when we were deploying the VAs. So, we have opened tickets a couple of times when we were stuck.

The technical support is alright. I would rate it as eight of 10. There was one time when I opened a ticket regarding the VAs, which didn't go quite well. However, it has been a good experience overall.

Positive

We did not previously use another DNS solution. This solution was our first.

It is very easy to maintain network connectivity. For medium- and large- enterprises, it is not going to take more than a week or so to deploy the solution. Or, you can deploy it with fewer complexities in a couple of hours. Therefore, it is not that hard to gel it into your existing network. So, it works like a charm for us.

In our environment, all traffic was going to the data center. It didn't take us much time, or the complexity of the network wasn't much, so it didn't bother us to pre-plan its migration. We just had to change all our DNSs on the perimeter firewalls and point them towards Umbrella, and that was it.

It has helped us to remediate threats more quickly.

It is pretty much handy in terms of what it offers. Actually, it is all about how it caters to your security. Every solution has their pros and cons, but Cisco Umbrella catches all the vulnerabilities and things that could hit any organization.

Previously, we were not tracking roaming clients, which were changing networks every time. I was wondering if something was hitting the endpoints, because we wouldn't know. When Cisco Umbrella joined our network, it explored all our networks. This was really interesting and a key part of why we chose it.

The end user isn't tech-savvy and doesn't care what is being done. As far as the system admin and network admins are concerned, their work has been reduced in terms of management and managing the entire network.

I would rate the solution as nine out of 10.

I am a Solutions Architect in a mining company, and the size of the company is around five to 10,000 employees.

We wanted to replace an existing solution and give a better experience to our users, and we wanted to have a superior solution that could give us insights into how secure our users are and what their browsing behaviors are to track down and narrow down issues. Of course, the first and foremost use case is protecting our users. Cisco Umbrella gave us all those things in one and having it integrated into our environment was a very seamless process, and we're very happy using it right now.

It gives you a single pane of glass to see what's going on with your environment and your DNS queries. It has consolidated a lot of previous efforts into the visibility of what's going on.

It saves time. You're protecting your users in a manner that you don't need to do anything after. If, for example, somebody tries to open a malicious website or tries to download something, it just won't allow that. That's it. Previously, there were loopholes and ways for users to get around the proxy, which gives you more work. In that sense, we're saving the support team's time. When you're investigating a problem, it quickly gives you insights into what you're looking for as simple as possible. You can see when a user was accessing a website, was it blocked or was it allowed? Of course, you could test connectivity for specific users and computers. That saves time in troubleshooting. It saves hours per week in comparison to the previous solution. 

The agent that gets installed on the endpoints or on people's laptops and devices is a Cisco AnyConnect Umbrella module. It's one of the most impressive things because you are able to protect your users anywhere they are.

Its reliability and the response time of the support team can be better. 

In terms of features, I know Cisco Umbrella has a lot of potential, and I'm not sure if we're using it to its full potential. I'm not aware of all the functionality, and for the functionality for which we're using it, it has been great. There probably is one place for improvement. We'll love to see any new features, new functionalities, and maybe better integration with other cloud platforms, but for us, it's good as it's now.

We've been using Cisco Umbrella for around four and a half years.

In terms of availability, we've seen it down a couple of times. It has become very stable recently, but we've seen it down. Maybe that's one area that they can improve on. It was not for a long time, but it caused a little panic among our users.

Scalability is happening with ease with Cisco Umbrella because you're either deploying another appliance in your branch office or another office, or you're pointing the endpoints to the existing appliances in your head office or any other place, and you're good to go. It's very scalable and easy to use, and you can have a new office ready in a day or less.

It's great. We've had some cases and issues, but they were resolved quickly and in a timely manner, and we're happy with it. I'd rate them an eight out of ten. They could be a little quicker, but technically, they're great.

Positive

The previous solution was a proxy solution. I'd not state the name of the solution, but it was a proxy solution. It was heavy. It was slow, and there was no easy way for tracking old things. And of course, you can't protect your users outside of the company environment.

I found it easy to implement. Cisco Umbrella has great documentation and great support teams, and implementing it was very easy for us. We just deployed the appliances, and we got through the initial basic policies. We were prepared to do it, so for us, it was very easy.

We did it ourselves. The documentation was good. We're experienced architects and network-oriented guys, so for us, it was just a great experience doing it.

The return on investment is in terms of time savings. It saves time and helps focus on other important things instead of digging into problems with users.

Because we're mostly Cisco-oriented, the solution was obvious. It was already integrated with all of our equipment. We already had Cisco AnyConnect, so it was just a matter of adding the module to it. We're Cisco-oriented, and that was just an obvious choice.

Do your math and check the competitors, but in the end, you won't find a much better solution that's already integrated with your Cisco environment. If you are a Cisco company, that's the way to go.

I'd rate Cisco Umbrella an eight out of ten.