Cisco Umbrella Reviews

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.

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. 

Our customers use Umbrella for a security network. They want to have DNS connectivity and drop traffic before it becomes dodgy. 

Clients implement Umbrella with the full proxy. 

Umbrella enables customers to be secure. We are happy with this and this is the most important benefit for customers.

DNS is the most valuable feature of Umbrella. We want to have DNS integration with data directories and we have customers asking about the Azure Integration. 

We try to fit all the Cisco Secure products together. This is the value the customers can see as well. We enable the Firewalls, Umbrella, and AMP so that the customer can see the whole view of what Cisco is doing. 

Our customers want to be able to work remotely. They want Umbrella to work securely from the office and to work securely outside of the office. 

We have been using Umbrella for years now. We have an Umbrella internally as well. I sell Umbrella to customers. We offer the full setup to them.

We are resellers and integrators.

The stability is getting better.

The scalability is fine. The central management, that comes with most solutions, is really good. It's easier for us to go from two devices to 20 devices.

We have had quite a good experience with their support so I can't complain about it. Most of the time TAC cases are quite straightforward and do not take a long time to fix.

Positive

Our clients deploy on public cloud, private cloud, hybrid cloud, on-premise, or SaaS.

I am an engineer and do the initial deployment for them and make tweaks until it works for them. 

The complexity of the deployment will depend on the client's requirements. Some of them have straightforward requirements and some of them are quite detailed. The implementation itself is fine but there can be details where we need to check the documentation and make sure we're following what they require. 

Customers use the Firewall Migration for the migration mostly from the ASAs. We do the ASA to FTD migration, which doesn't work well.

Two or three engineers are required for the deployment. The installation is done by different engineers.  

We also do the maintenance. So whatever we deployed, we also support. We do all the support requirements, updating and reviewing the deployment that we did. We do the config that is required. For example, for the migration, if we deploy something, we come back to review what we did because we want to make sure that the customer is more secure than it was before. So we just rerun the same configuration, trying to find out if there's a gap that we can fix and make sure that the customer is secure.

The pricing changes too fast. We get the license and we need to relicense it because they already made changes to it. We always need to be on top of the licenses because they're always changing.

Cisco Talos seems to be working fine for our customers. 

My advice to somebody considering this solution is to try it. It's probably the best option to try it and see if it works. Do a proof of concept and proof of value for the customer.

Most of the time, it's for security reasons in terms of looking at what DNS requests are being done and other things like that.

It has certainly saved us time. If we go and look at what's rejected on the requests from the hospital itself, it has saved about 5% or 6% time.

It's there to keep everything secure. Hospitals are a very nice target for attacks. We have been under an attack from Russia once, which was a DDoS attack.

It secures our infrastructure from end to end so we can detect and remediate threats.

The protection from users doing stupid things is valuable. The dashboard gives me the information I need.

Its price could be better.

I've been using it for about two years.

It's very stable. I've never seen any problems with it.

It's perfect for the things we have with it. There is a quick resolution. There are no problems at all. I'd rate them a nine out of ten.

Positive

I've not used a similar solution. We went for Cisco Umbrella because they are delivering good products. We also have all Cisco switches in place, and then we have Cisco ACI and DNA Center. We only don't have Cisco firewalls.

I am not aware of any tools that we could consolidate or get rid of by using Cisco Umbrella because it was installed about five or six years before I came here.

Cisco is expensive. For example, we are looking at Nexus Dashboard, and it's costing about 250,000 euros. I ask, "What do I get from it?" I'm still not convinced that we have to spend on it, so pricing is a problem.

It's a very good product. I'd rate it an eight out of ten. Overall, I am satisfied with the product.

What I find most valuable about Cisco Umbrella is its ease of use. I also value the clearness of the categories. We have not experienced any issues or incidents with the categories. However, we are looking more deeply at the product now. 

We are very new users of the solution and are still in the exploration stages, but we are happy with the product thus far. However, there are some features available in Fortinet and Palo Alto that are not available in Cisco, like objects, for example. I would like to see Cisco enable us to get objects from the internet. I would also like to be able to choose groups. 

I have been using Cisco Umbrella for two to three months now. 

For most of our technical support needs, we mostly go through our partner. However, for some infrastructure-related inquiries, we have had to contact Cisco's technical support and we were happy with the experience.  

Positive

The initial setup was simple. Deployment at our main sites took about three to four weeks. 

We received help from a local partner, NTT Global, during the deployment. They helped us set up Meraki and Umbrella. 

We hope to see a return on investment with Cisco Umbrella. We have a big team managing the infrastructure, so we hope to save time in the day-to-day protection of the tower, which would be the return on investment.

Globally, we also hope to save time on the LAN. We aim for a single pane of glass management model with the dashboard. 

From what I remember about the pricing, Cisco Umbrella is a bit more expensive than the quotes we got from its competitors. 

We looked at several products, including Fortinet and Palo Alto. We experienced a bug with Fortinet during testing and ultimately ended up going with Cisco Meraki products. We have not had an incident yet with Cisco Umbrella.

The solution helped us save time and this was a major reason we chose it. We expect to save 15% to 20% in time.

We are aiming to consolidate our entire network and LAN infrastructure with Cisco Umbrella. We are on the way to achieving that with this solution.

Our primary use case for Cisco Umbrella is DNS filtering. We also have virtual appliances installed at almost all of our sites. 

We refer our end users to the local VAs and also to the public Umbrella DNS. We mostly use it for the guest network. For internal users, we have dedicated virtual appliances installed at every site. We have a number of offices globally and each major site will have one VA.

Thanks to Cisco Umbrella, we are better able to respond to malicious attacks and block those domains right away. 

The most valuable features in my opinion are DNS filtering, filtering details, and the ability to block certain web pages. However, we mostly use DNS filtering. I also think that the dashboard view is really helpful. Whenever sites get blocked, we get the details and the users who are connecting to them.

There is room for improvement in the dashboard. It could stand to be a bit more detailed. I would also like to be able to customize the dashboard to focus more on what is important for my company. This would be particularly important for the customized dashboard we create for the leadership team. This would help us get information to them quickly.

I have been using Cisco Umbrella for the last three to four years. 

Cisco Umbrella is stable. 

We use Cisco Umbrella across multiple offices so it is scalable. For the smallest offices, we use data center VAs and even in that configuration, it is scalable. 

Cisco's tech support is OK. I have had only good experiences with them. 

They could work on getting on the calls more quickly because it can be difficult to reach them sometimes. This is particularly true during P1 outages. 

On the other hand, they do really well with giving us helpful suggestions and additional information when we need it. The documentation is particularly good. 

Positive

We did not previously use a different solution. We were blocking things through the Cisco firewall. 

Migrating from our previous firewall configuration to Cisco Umbrella was not so difficult. We did not additionally configure the normal firewall policies. All we did with this solution was add an additional layer of security.

The initial setup is not simple. It is quite difficult and cannot be implemented by everyone. You need to have some basic understanding of the product to deploy it. You need to understand DNS filtering and domain blocking and have a working knowledge of DNS and how it works. You should also have experience with virtual machines and VM detecting because Cisco Umbrella is on a VM. 

We have seen a return on investment from Cisco Umbrella. We have seen many benefits. 

We are Cisco partners so we get a discount on the licensing. With the discount, I would say the pricing is OK. 

We did not evaluate other options. Ultimately, we landed on Cisco because it is more user-friendly than its competitors. 

End-to-end detection is mostly used for end users. We make use of it and it works well for us. It helps us find malicious attacks and identify other breaches. Cisco Umbrella is helpful when it comes to remediation as well. Whenever there is a new attack, we receive a notification and we block the domains through the solution. 

Cisco Umbrella frees up time for our IT staff, particularly the network operations team. They use this product to find attacks and users who access non-allowed pages. However, I cannot say exactly how much time is saved because it all depends on the day. We have offices across the globe and each is impacted individually by the solution.

Cisco Umbrella has not caused our organization to consolidate tools.

I had implemented Cisco Umbrella at a previous company. I'm now working at another company where I'm not using this solution. We've got another solution here.

The policy of the company was to make sure all outgoing traffic was sent through a filtering service, and OpenDNS, and then Cisco Umbrella, was chosen for that purpose. Once it was taken over by Cisco Umbrella, it had far more capacity and far more functionality written into it. 

In terms of the deployment model, I just used Cisco services. It would be through Cisco's private cloud. My site wasn't big enough. So, I didn't deploy the Cisco service on-premises. 

It was really valuable to me in protecting the outgoing data of the company. It was good for reporting. Every computer had the Cisco Umbrella program installed. So, I had good reporting on any issues related to outgoing data, such as whether there were any phishing or dodgy sites connected. It protected that part of the business.

A combination of Cisco ASA, Cisco Umbrella, and Cisco AMP connecting to the SecureX portal gave me all-around security for the site because they all reported into a central reporting server. If there were any issues, I could have got full details, even if a crypto locker attempt was made. I never had any security incidents that I'm aware of. So, it was a very effective tool.

It kept itself updated. So, I didn't have to worry about continuing to push out new installs of the program.

I felt safe, supported, and secure, and so did the owner of the company. It worked silently in the background, and no one else really knew it was working on their computers. When we went into lockdown with COVID, I was happy knowing that all the computers that left the business had the app installed and were going to be functioning securely. We got no viruses and no issues on any computer on the network, which is quite unusual. A lot of other people or a lot of other companies I spoke to reported that they had quite a few issues.

It worked 100% in terms of applying and maintaining network connectivity consistently across all workplaces. We never had any issues. The only issues we had were when sites might have been blocked because they were suspected of being within a filtering group. It would report back to the user and say, "This site is currently blocked by your administrator. Please click this button. An email will be sent to your administrator, and they can resolve the issue." I would then get the email, and I'd look at the site, and then I'd release it through whitelisting. It was very user-friendly in that regard.

It certainly helped to remediate threats more quickly because I was able to stay free of any virus outbreaks. It definitely locks out that part of the transmission where the virus will go out and attempt to download a package.

It worked silently and didn't use too many computer resources. It was really silent in its operation on the network. It had a really good impact on me. I'd love to put it in my new company, but we've gone down a different pathway. That's being resolved through Office 365 now, and I'm not proposing to change that technology.

I wanted to ensure that all outgoing traffic went through Cisco AMP servers. So, if we did get a crypto locking incident or any malicious sites that wanted to direct traffic to particular websites, they would be unable to do that because they would be blocked by the Cisco Umbrella DNS servers.

It also did website filtering for preventing access to porn sites and gambling sites. It had all other standard features. It had a good section where you could whitelist and blacklist websites.

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.

The other useful feature was that if we were to get a malicious actor onto a server or service running somewhere, it would still have to go out through the Umbrella servers. So, it would more likely be blocked through there. It had multiple features that were super handy.

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. However, that's dangerous too because you can be turning off an app in a group because you don't know what it is doing. It could be a vital company app. So, App control is the main area in which they need to keep working.

Originally, Cisco Umbrella was called OpenDNS. I have used OpenDNS and Cisco Umbrella for about six years.

It is very stable. I never had any issue with it.

It is highly scalable. You don't even have to install it on your computers. You just change your DNS, and it'll start to work internally immediately. I never had any issues with performance or anything like that. I'm sure it would suit larger companies as well, but larger companies would install their own Umbrella service on their own systems and deal with the capacity that way. So, it is very scalable.

Their support is good. They always got back to me and answered issues. They showed me how to do my own debugging. They were always very professional and helpful. I would rate them a 10 out of 10.

Positive

We previously used proxy servers, but I wanted a more modern interface, and that's why I chose Umbrella.

It was super easy. I'm a general IT person, and I was able to deploy it. I read the documentation, changed some settings, changed the DNS on my servers, and then rolled it out to the team. It was a pain-free implementation.

I deployed it. It was pretty intuitive. I didn't have a consultant help me. I was able to implement the solution myself and manage it myself. That's a really good rating for an application. There are different systems you get to manage these days, and you can't have training on all of them. Because I rolled it out, I knew I rolled it out properly, and the system was working effectively. It was good. I liked using it.

The return on investment was that we kept the company secure. Nothing happened, which is the ultimate return on investment.

It was a little bit expensive on a per seat basis, but the company I was running was only a midsize Australian company, and it was a reasonable budget per computer for that system.

It started off being a free product, and then Cisco bought it, and it went to a reasonable price. I was using Cisco AMP as well. So, my per computer cost was reasonably high, but for a small company, it was within an acceptable level.

Not having reviewed other systems, I can't tell how they compare, but I know that when you do special security licensing with Microsoft, it is on par. So, it is probably standard within the industry.

At the time, we were using OpenDNS, and then OpenDNS went to Cisco Umbrella. Because we'd had such success with OpenDNS, we just stayed on with the product. So, I didn't evaluate any other products at that time.

It is just another layer that you need to wrap around your company to keep it safe unless you could just shut off that possible attack vector from external parties.

To leaders who want to build more resilience within their organization, I would say that they've got to keep doing it, and they've got to keep working on it. I'm constantly looking for better ways to secure the company. Cisco Umbrella would be a very useful addition to their set of tools. 

A part of my plan in the long term was to implement the full suite. I never got around to that, but it was really good to know that I could go right down to app-level control. It was a very successful product, and I'd certainly recommend it to any business looking to just add another layer of security around their company.

In terms of providing a single pane of glass management, security does involve multiple systems, and I could log them all into the Cisco SecureX system. From there, I could get my single point where I could resolve issues with viruses, et cetera. So, in itself, it was a single pane of glass for DNS protection. It was fine, but I don't think there is ever going to be a single pane of glass anywhere. You're always going to have many different systems that you're using, but overall, it had a lot of features. It did the job it needed to do.

I would rate it a 9 out of 10. It is just app control that I want them to develop more.

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.

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.

We're actually in the process of using this to replace our current web proxies. We use both, side-by-side, at the moment. The plan in the future is to eventually get those replaced with Umbrella so that we can have an overall, overarching proxy either that's based in the cloud or whatever we need. But this currently is our most convenient way of replacing web proxies across all of our locations at our company.

It's definitely made things more centralized. Our current setup is that we have proxies, either physical or virtual, throughout our different locations. Each location has its own proxy at the moment. What's nice about Umbrella is that we can just go into the site and see all of our locations in one place and look at all of our computers, users—everything. It's not divided into separate proxies that we have to go into and figure out which person's using which proxy. Umbrella lets us just see everybody at once, which is really handy for us, and we don't have to spend too much time messing around with figuring out who's where and which location needs this change. [We can just make] changes throughout every location at once, rather than one at a time with those proxies that we currently use.

The past couple of years, [the fact that the solution helps support hybrid work has been] especially important because now we can't use those proxies if people aren't onsite. The way our network was set up was that we had it filtering through the firewall and the firewall was taking certain subnets and filtering those through the proxy. But obviously, when people work from home, we had to get a VPN connection set up. Before COVID, we did not have a work-from-home solution at the time, so everybody had to be in the office. Obviously, that all changed very quickly and Umbrella became a much bigger priority for us because that was our main replacement for those proxies at the time.

We had to expedite the process of setting it up, but what was nice about Umbrella was that it was so user-friendly, it was so easy to set up on our end, that it didn't take as much time as we thought it would. It just simplified the entire process throughout the couple of years that we have especially needed it. But what's cool about that is that now, it's a permanent part of our network. Thanks to the last couple of years, we use it all the time now. It wasn't just a temporary solution for hybrid work because now we use it for both. We have the ability to do hybrid work, but we also have the ability to use it for our employees onsite as well.

[When it comes to threat remediation] most of it is automatic so we don't really have to worry about it too much. Umbrella will just block something if it detects it as malware. That is a super convenient feature for us, that we don't have to manually review every single site. If we do have to review a site, it's nice to have that investigative tool. We put in the URL and it gives us a risk score, depending on how dangerous that site might be. That's super helpful for us to analyze that site, take a look at it, and make a decision on whether we need to block it, or if it can be unblocked. Every situation is different, but Umbrella makes that summary page very convenient for us. It allows us to make decisions much faster and more efficiently.

Our cyber team is a bit different from our network team. We have a separate team for that, but it's nice because they also use Umbrella for a lot of that, depending on what the site is. We use the investigative tool for the risk score, but it also comes with a few other tools, and part of that is just so that they can assess what's safe and what's not safe and what might be detected as malware. Obviously, they have other tools for that as well, so Umbrella is just one cog in the big system. But it definitely allows for easier communication between our teams because we both use it and we can both understand it. It's user-friendly enough so that we can make decisions with them based on what Umbrella tells us and how we interpret that information depending on the site, the situation, the risk score, everything.

We have a lot of employees, a few tens of thousands. We get probably hundreds [of threats blocked] every day. I wouldn't be able to give an exact number on how many are blocked. The main ones we look at are the ones that people request us to specifically look at because they might not think that something was supposed to be blocked, or something is not working properly, and we can go in and investigate that. But there are probably hundreds to thousands of blocks per day on the sites, across all of our locations. That automation allows us to relax a little bit easier and know that our network is much safer with Umbrella on it than it is off. The automatic side of it is basically saving our jobs. That really helps, and we're able to look at anything. Overall, as a program, it has saved us a ton of time and stress by not having to worry about malware or viruses or anything malicious.

One of the coolest features, for me at least, is to be able to type in a website and have it  give an overall summary of how safe that website appears. Part of that is just so that we can investigate. And if there's any sort of confusion between our cyber team and us, we can look further into that site and dive more into that risk score that Umbrella gives us. We can just analyze [those sites] and make sure that we're unblocking safe sites and blocking sites that we deem could be harmful for our employees.

I would say it provides single-pane-of-glass management. We still, of course, use those old WSAs, but in the long run, our plan is to get those replaced with Umbrella. We have locations in Japan, Korea, China. So it's a little bit more difficult to go through one proxy for all of those, especially because it's a bit slower. What's nice is, [with] Umbrella being in the cloud, we can just go into the site, see everything from the management console in that page. Nothing is slow [and] nothing is hosted by us so that we don't have to worry about network issues or management issues. Everything is just laid out right in front of us from the Umbrella dashboard on the internet, in the cloud. And that makes it super helpful for us to just manage all that from one spot across all of our locations across the world.

We aren't a very big team, so that's the main thing. Going through filtering web traffic or blocking sites or unblocking sites, whatever we need to do, can be a bit tedious, especially when we have all these different locations and we would have to go into each location specifically to perform these tasks. 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. And that makes it super useful for us because we're not messing around with jumping into all these different locations and manually doing each and every one individually. It is extremely helpful for us and it improves efficiency exponentially.

I have personally been using Cisco Umbrella for almost a couple of years. Our company implemented it about five or six years ago. Most of that time was spent getting it set up, but we've really been using it more within the last two or three years now, so it's still pretty new to us at the moment.

[In terms of maintaining network connectivity] obviously it depends on the situation. With Umbrella, it's a bit easier, for sure. There are times where Umbrella, on their side, is having an issue and we're notified of that issue. But in that case, there isn't really much on our side that we can do. To that extent though, the pros outweigh the cons. It's pretty rare that Umbrella is having a problem. The way that our network is set up is that we can reroute traffic pretty quickly using our other Cisco devices, so it's not usually a big issue for us. We have fewer problems with Umbrella than we do with our physical WSA proxies that we currently use, because that is something that we would have to troubleshoot on our end, and we're not always there on site to be able to do that. Then we have to go through someone else who's over there and they have to console us in and we have to troubleshoot whatever's going on over there.

With Umbrella, it's nice to have them tell us what's going on so that we're aware of the situation. If there are any problems, then we'd know what the issue was and how we could work around it. That makes it a bit simpler for us.

Network connectivity isn't really a huge issue for us with Umbrella, specifically. Our use case mainly is just for blocking internet traffic, making groups. We have social media groups where we allow certain computers in places to have access to certain social media sites that we wouldn't normally do. We have other sites being blocked, depending on their use case. That's mainly our function with Umbrella. Internet connectivity is usually not a huge issue regarding Umbrella with us, but if it ever is, it's nice that they communicate the issue to us, [so] that we can work around it.

In my experience with Umbrella support, sometimes the response times take a bit more time than we would like. Obviously, it depends on how they're contacted. But usually, when I contact them via phone, their support team is great. They help me out with everything. But sometimes, if you go through email, it can take quite a while to get a response. Obviously, if it's through email, the issue's probably not as pressing as it would be through a phone call, but the response times could be a little bit better. Email, I usually just avoid. I usually just call them now.

They're super helpful. In terms of response times, it could be a little bit better. Some issues are more urgent than others, but if it's an urgent issue, obviously we just call. Sometimes it takes a little bit [of time] for them to get back. I would probably rate them a seven out of ten.

Neutral

We've had to deploy connectors across certain locations, but [in] all the locations we have a domain controller and that needs to be deployed on those domain controllers throughout all of our different places. I've done a couple of deployments. Most of it was already deployed just by the time I got here. 

[In] my experience of how deployment went, it was very easily laid out, very simple. The instructions were super clear. I didn't have any issues with that. As more of a newcomer to the entire industry, this has been much easier than I expected it to be. Umbrella, as a product, is very simply laid out, very user-friendly. I couldn't praise it enough for helping me out with my job. 

While the support [can] sometimes take a while, overall they're super helpful, they make it very easy and they make you feel like you're not doing anything wrong. They're super friendly and make everything super easy for you. Umbrella as a product, overall, is very user-friendly, as a newcomer to my company.

The plan is to replace those physical proxies that we have. In terms of return on investment, getting rid of those across each location [has been valuable]. In terms of the efficiency with time, it's definitely saved us a lot of time and money troubleshooting different issues and securing the network and helping people access what they need to access. Just in terms of time and efficiency, it definitely has a return on investment.

Trying to replace those physical ones as well, getting rid of those, just having this be the all-encompassing way of filtering traffic and unblocking, of making policies, it definitely saves us a lot of time with the solution that's offered.

In terms of [our employees] feeling supported, they have the ability to submit a request to us very easily. When they get blocked from a site, it's not just one page saying you're not allowed here. They have the ability to submit a request to us so that we can look further into that site. That makes our employees feel more included in the process of helping the company access the sites that it needs to use, [as does our] communicating with those employees [about] why a site might be blocked; or a site that needs to be blocked based on what they find and what they're doing for their job. The important thing is that they're able to talk to us in case there's a site that they think that they need to access and helps them feel included in the entire process.

Like I mentioned earlier, it's one cog in the big system that we have out of our solutions for cybersecurity. We also use products like AMP, we have certain firewalls that also block certain things, the way they're configured. But overall, Umbrella, if we're talking about users on the internet, using sites or accessing different websites, is a big help in determining what exactly they need. We can go into Umbrella and help them understand why something might be blocked, or if they need to get into something, we can make certain policies within Umbrella. It's obviously just one tool out of the many that we have, so these configurations are pretty involved and even I don't know how they all work. It's divided amongst our team. For cybersecurity in general, it's great. It simplifies it. It's very useful in terms of the automation and how it blocks everything, and how all that stuff is interconnected. I would say that it is a lifesaver for us.

As somebody who is pretty familiar with networks and just learning everything, but being an inexperienced network manager, I would say that it makes the entire process very painless, very super simple to understand. In my experience, it's a nine out of 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.