Cisco Umbrella Reviews

Cisco Umbrella improves web security posture.

Meraki features and cloud-based functionality are advanced and easy to manage centrally.

Reporting is a separate product. However, other features are embedded within the devices themselves. So, if you have one box, everything is included, which is good.

A more user-friendly interface like Kaspersky and lower costs including licensing, support, and renewals would be beneficial.

My company has been using it since 2005. 

It is a stable product. 

It is a scalable product.

The customer service and support are excellent, exceeding expectations.

Positive

I used Sophos, FortiGate, and Palo Alto firewalls.

Cisco Umbrella is manageable and well-supported by various vendors and partners, including Cisco Direct. It offers diverse technologies and features. However, now Sophos and FortiGate offer better tools and firewalls than Cisco.

Forti excels in SD-WAN services and integrates various functionalities like FortiManager, FortiAnalyzer, and Wi-Fi controller within a single device.

It is easy to implement. It is not straightforward, but it is easy. It is easier than before. 

The licensing cost is very high. We have to pay for support, renewal, and maintenance. FortiNet is cheaper compared to Cisco Umbrella. 

Consider your budget. If you can afford it, Cisco Umbrella is a stable and scalable solution.

It's a strong Cisco product.

Overall, I would rate the solution a nine out of ten. 

Our primary use case was to first replace the solution we had since it wasn't able to give us security outside our premises. Also in terms of configuration, we had to have extra configurations in our Active Directory to identify the users and the equipment. Cisco Umbrella gave us a chance to do it in a more clean way, without having extra software working on our domain controllers.

Cisco Umbrella is deployed as a cloud solution with an on-premises server so that it can make the connection through our Active Directory to identify the equipment.

The most value we've seen after using it for a month is the ability to identify more clearly the usage of any device.

With Cisco Umbrella I am able to manage DNS resolutions on our devices both when they are inside and outside our network, supporting a hybrid work environment.

Umbrella has helped my IT staff in two ways. First, our security team was able to get more insights into the users, their devices, and the sites they browse. Second, our system administration team was able to manage DNS resolutions in a way that is more accessible and less intrusive to our domain system.

Soon, our IT staff will be able to save time because we'll be able to automate some security functions. The dashboard is very clean and user-friendly. Thus, at a glance, we will be able to see a lot of information that will help us identify more directly the sources and the root causes of security issues.

It's easier for us to have support features with companies who are Cisco representatives, but sometimes, it's hard for us to get the help we need without having to use our contacts within Cisco.

We've been using Cisco Umbrella for nearly a month.

We have not had any issues with stability, but we've only had the solution for one month.

The few times when we had to contact Cisco's technical support directly, we had perfect interactions with them. Therefore, I would give technical support a rating of ten out of ten.

Positive

We were using another solution for DNS security. It was not as complete and  would only allow us to manage security inside our network. We weren't able to get to the endpoints when staff were not working on-premises. We did a proof of concept with Cisco Umbrella and two other solutions for three months and chose to go with Cisco Umbrella because it gave us the features that were more suited to our organization.

In our environment, it was straightforward and simple to implement Umbrella. We had SCCM for the end devices for mass deployment. Our domain controllers were connected to the server. The initial parameterization only took us three days. Currently, we are in the most difficult part of fine-tuning the solution so we can take full advantage of its features.

Our Cisco partner helped us with the implementation.

Pricing and licensing of Cisco Umbrella is a bit confusing because you have to separate the DNS solution and the full-feature solution. Cisco in Portugal helped us understand which one was the right one for us.

Since Cisco Umbrella has given me better performance and extra features that I didn't have previously, I would give it the maximum rating of ten out of ten.

I'm a principal consultant for one of the energy sector companies, which basically extracts oil and gas and also deals with solar energy. We are dealing with anything related to energy. It's a supply chain as well.

We have been using Cisco Umbrella for more than one year. Basically, after the COVID situation, when the hybrid model came, we needed to give work-from-home options to the employees and look into cybersecurity. We had to get some cloud security. That is why we have introduced Cisco Umbrella.

We chose Cisco Umbrella because it's a better option industry-wide. It can inspect all the web traffic from anywhere. When traffic is generated from any local internet, it might be anything. It doesn't qualify for cyber security for any company. That's why you have to have something to inspect all the traffic. Cisco is a good vendor for us. That's why we chose Cisco Umbrella.

By using Cisco Umbrella, you are sure of inspecting all the traffic. Whenever the user machine is connected to your network, it is inspected. That's the best thing. It means you are sure that nothing is being exported or imported without your choice. That is the best feature.

It generates alerts, and you can integrate it with your ticketing tool. When it's integrated, it can also generate a ticket. That means you know when something is wrong or what's going on. It has helped a lot during this hybrid model, and I don't think that this hybrid model is going anywhere. So, you can simply say that Cisco Umbrella is a good tool for the future as well.

It hasn't freed up our IT staff for other projects because no one thought about this work-from-home model before COVID. There were many alerts after Cisco Umbrella was installed, which means many staff members were invested, but its automation, such as automatically generating alerts and automatically assigning tickets to a queue, has helped a lot. We don't need to do any physical or manual inspection. It's being done automatically, which is a good point, but it hasn't decreased any resource hours.

It's the best tool to inspect everything. We can inspect all the user traffic generated from anything.

If you wish to inspect all the traffic and it's integrated with Cisco AnyConnect, all the traffic basically goes through Cisco AnyConnect, which is not a good idea. That means you need to have more internet capacity as a data sampler, so in the case of a split tunnel, we cannot inspect the traffic that is being migrated through the local internet. I'm not sure whether there is a possibility wherein Cisco Umbrella can also inspect the traffic that is outside the AnyConnect tunnel.

We have been using Cisco Umbrella for more than one year.

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. 

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 use Umbrella to front-end all of our DNS requests and that way they protect any of our end-users from going to any kind of malicious site. It doesn't matter if they're in-house in one of our locations, or if they're remote and working from home. That was the biggest part was the fact that we could protect our end-users, even when they're not in the office.

We were actually trying to solve other challenges, which included just to protect the onsite, but once COVID hit, it pretty much made it a very easy transition for us. At one point, when COVID was at its highest peak, we had everyone working remotely. We didn't have to worry about how we were going to restrict our access on the internet, because Umbrella was already handling that for us.

It made us more secure, which is a very important thing for a financial institution.

The support for hybrid work was the biggest thing. It protects our users, whether they're in the office or they're out of the office. We get the same policy in both locations. We can assign policies based on individual group memberships and it travels with them no matter where they go. It helps no matter where they are.

Since it's based on user DNS requests, it's right from the endpoint all the way through the network to be able to identify those locations and restrict access if necessary. It's not just the malware sites, which is very important, but it's also just content in general. There are business reasons for restricting access to certain content.

Since we implemented Umbrella, we are seeing a fairly significant amount of threats being blocked. A good 20 percent of all the activity, on average, that we see is actually being blocked by Umbrella, because it's either violating policy or it's some kind of malware.

Both monitoring the activity, so that we can investigate anything that may pop up, and the ability to restrict the access, or filter out what content end-users can view or go to [are valuable features of Umbrella]. Also, the fact that it blocks them from any known malicious locations.

It works really well and the best part about it is the fact that it's transparent to the users until they try to go somewhere that's either restricted because of content or restricted because of the fact that it's malicious. Then they simply get a popup and that's all there is to it. So from their perspective, it's very easy. They don't have to do anything in order for it to work.

There is a single portal that we go to that handles being able to set up policy, look at activity, or even manually add sites that we think that we want to restrict, even if it's not considered a particular category or a particular malware. The single-pane-of-glass management is very important. We have a very small team. We can't spend a lot of time going from product to product to product to either investigate or set up policy. We need to have one place that we can go to and set everything up.

It's really easy. It's an easy portal to go to, it's cloud-based, so we can get to it from anywhere. The ability to set up the policy is pretty straightforward. There are a lot of tie-ins with other products, like SecureX and other things, that make it just as easy.

It's cloud-based, so as long as you can get to the cloud, you're golden.

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

I have been using Cisco Umbrella for about four years now.

It's been extremely stable. In the last four years, I do not recall a single outage. There has been nothing that I can think of that actually affected the performance of the system at all in the last four years.

We've never had an issue with scale. We've scaled it up to every user that we have in-house. When we deployed the gateways, we deployed two for HA purposes, but from a scale perspective, it's DNS queries. It doesn't take much. Our whole organization is on it.

Support for Umbrella is very good. There's a way to contact them directly from within the portal and we use that periodically.

I give them about a nine out of 10. There are issues with Cisco's tech support, like all the rest of them.

Positive

Umbrella was actually the first [solution we used in this area]. Once we discovered that that was a big hole we had—we didn't have anything that was controlling content for our internal end-users—we could run into problems with regulation, problems with compliance. It could run into issues with HR, as well as security issues associated with malware. We knew it was a hole, that we were missing. Umbrella filled that hole for us.

There were two pieces of the deployment. One was the cloud deployment, which got us set up in the cloud to begin with. We also had gateways that were installed on-prem, in-house.

We were able to get the gateways up and running in about an hour. The cloud deployment was all done by the Umbrella organization on the back-end side. To deploy to the end users, all we needed to do is set up a policy that said, "This is what you use for DNS." Once that was set up, we were done. Deploying that was done in a group policy and that group policy was pushed in a matter of minutes. The entire solution was probably deployed in just a few hours.

We did it all ourselves. Cisco handled the back-end side with the portal itself, but the rest of it, we did ourselves.

I think we got our return on investment within the first month of its use, because of the increased security that we had in the organization; the ability to have a product that is protecting our end-users. We do educate our end users today, but Umbrella doesn't require us to go through as in-depth an education process to say, "Okay, you're going to have to do the research. You're going to have to figure out what sites are bad. You're going to have to figure out where not to go." We don't have to do any of that. That's all handled by Umbrella. We just need to let them know that we're protecting them on the back-end side.

Its value exceeds its pricing.

We looked around to see what was available. There were a lot of content filtering solutions available, but one of the things that Umbrella brings, in addition to content filtering, is that awareness of known threat sites. Their tie-in with Talos, Talos being that organization that does all that research and feeds that into Umbrella, means that we not only have known malware sites from six months ago, but we're getting feeds from Talos within hours.

The impact on our employees' morale has been good. Anytime the employees understand that we're doing something from a technology standpoint to secure the organization more, that makes them happy. It's something that they don't have to concern themselves with as much and it improves morale quite a bit.

Resilience in cyber security is extremely important. We're a financial institution, so cyber security is very high on our organizational goals, all the time. Making sure that cyber security is resilient against any of the latest attacks that are coming out is extremely important. It's a constant thing. Cyber attacks are increasing every single year. The methods that are being used are increasing every single year. If something were to happen, not only would we have a financial impact, but we have a reputational impact. For a financial institution, a reputational impact could be just as devastating as a financial one.

Umbrella helps us with that overall security. It gives one less attack vector for the bad guys to get into. We're protecting those end-user devices and we're protecting those end-users from going to places that could be malicious. The fact that it's doing that for those end-users increases our overall security without us having to rely specifically on end-user education in that particular attack vector.

For leaders who are looking to increase resilience within their organizations, I would say that what is necessary is to do as much security, in-depth, as you can. That includes using Umbrella to protect your users and using lots of other security products and being able to secure every aspect of your organization.

I would rate Umbrella absolutely a 10 out of 10. It's literally a lifesaver when it comes to being able to protect our endpoints.

We use Cisco Umbrella to secure our gateway. All of the DNS forwarding coming out of the company from any site or all the DNS requests are forwarded through Cisco Umbrella, and then they determine if that is a safe address and if the content coming back is safe. They will either reject the addressing out of hand, or they'll look at the Layer 7 content and reject that from making it back to us.

We are using the Secure Internet Gateway (SIG) Advantage package. In terms of deployment, effectively, it's deployed from our private cloud. It's in our data closet on our servers.

It enables us to finally allow laptops to be used as workstations and allow data to leave the building. In the past, laptops were only used for VPN access, but they would connect back to their data inside the company. This has allowed us to have a level of confidence that they're protected as if they were behind our firewall. So, now, we've got work-from-home people who literally have their workstations with them.

We have six sites with 60 to 70 users. The baseline configuration allows for additional protection for any DNS requests as they leave those sites, and then the secondary policy is for the mobile devices as they leave the premises. When they're connected to public WiFi, they have an additional policy that kicks in for that time that they're not connected back to the company. So, when they're on public WiFi without a VPN, the tool will actually put that second policy in place that's more aggressive and offers a higher level of protection when it's not sitting behind the firewall. All that is automated. It's all built into the agent.

We don't allow WiFi inside of our network for connection to our actual business network. As soon as a device is docked, it disables WiFi on that mobile device.

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

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

Apparently, Cisco Umbrella has got that as a feature request to allow an administrator to say, "I specifically only want traffic to and from these countries. Everything else should be dumped." That way, when they're sitting behind my network or they go out in the wild, they have that same level of traffic being blocked.

I have been using it for 14 to 15 years.

We've had no issues. It has done exactly what it's supposed to do.

It is cloud-based. So, scalability should not be an issue. 

Any increase in its usage is all relative to the growth of our staff. Currently, we deploy the laptops for people who need to work from home or are traveling between the banks. That's roughly about 20% of our total staff. Some people aren't going to be working from home, and some of their jobs can't be done from home. They have no need for mobile devices. If there is a need to work from home, its usage will increase. It is there if we need it to scale, but at this point, it is not scheduled to change.

Once I became a paying customer, it was much better. The preliminary training is there, but when you get into the nuances and the details of some of its capabilities, you need to talk to tech support. Once you're a paid customer, you get direct access, and then it's good. When I'm able to get a hold of them, their technical support is a 10 out of 10.

Positive

I didn't use any similar solution previously. 

I was a hundred percent involved in its deployment. We had a couple of issues. The proof of concept was done without a lot of planning. So, there were some mistakes made along the way. If I was doing it again the second time, I wouldn't make the same mistakes. 

The default configurations have your baselines. Those are never supposed to get changed, and I changed and tweaked those for our proof of concept. After a couple of weeks, I had some additional guidance from the Cisco Umbrella team. You leave the baseline configuration, and then you clone and create a new configuration that sits in front of it. So, everyone gets the baseline, and you don't change that. If you want to change it, you make a new policy and then make the changes to that. If you change the baseline default policy and you make a mistake in it, you've to back that all out. If you make it in the new policy, in the worst case, you just delete it, and automatically everyone goes back to baseline. So, there's still a policy in effect. That was a training issue that should have been resolved. Now that I've done it, if somebody asks me, I would say that this is the way you've got to do it.

It was just me taking care of its deployment. In terms of maintenance, once it's configured, unless you're retweaking and adding or removing something that was blocked, it pretty much runs itself.

I have less maintenance to resolve, fix, and reconfigure VPN clients personally, and the feedback from the end-users is that they're more productive.

We were using the free version, and we implemented the paid version about two months ago.

I'm paying a fair price, but everything is negotiable with Cisco. One of the benefits that I got by having Cisco Umbrella is the licensing of the Cisco AnyConnect VPN client. There has always been an issue for years and years with Cisco Meraki in terms of VPN clients and using the native built-in Windows client. It keeps reconfiguring itself. By using Cisco AnyConnect as the VPN client, it's not affected by Windows patching or people typing in passwords by mistake. It's more resilient and doesn't change. With just Meraki solution, there was an extra expense for the Cisco AnyConnect VPN client. By having Cisco Umbrella, that licensing is now included.

There were a couple of other options, and I discussed them with another consultant. As a regulated industry, we have to do vendor management, and vendors have to be vetted. So, Cisco was already a vetted vendor. There are other companies that do the same thing, but Cisco didn't require me to do any more vetting. They were already a vendor.

When it's configured the way it's supposed to work, it turns itself on and off based on the status of the VPN or the dock condition. Once it's configured, it does exactly what it's supposed to do. 

If you're doing a proof of concept on it, fully understand how the policies are configured and what the flow is. You should understand the hierarchical status of the policies to configure it right the first time. You don't really want to guess it.

I would rate it a 10 out of 10.