Cisco Umbrella Reviews

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.

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.

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.

Our primary use case is for filtering and security reasons. We send our DNS queries to Umbrella. It will see if we go to a site that has malware or a virus and it will stop it. It detects if the URL has malware.

The multilayers of defense have improved my organization. We have a lot of defensive layers and DNS queries from Cisco is one of them. 

The most valuable feature is its ability to detect if a URL has malware or is vulnerable.  

I would like for their support to be faster. 

We have been using Cisco Umbrella for six to seven years. 

I have never experienced a stability issue where the site went down. 

I would rate the scalability a ten out of ten. 

Support doesn't always get back to me right away but they'll send me an email with the solution. It's not critical. I don't have an issue with it. I would rate their support an eight out of ten. I took two points off because it can take a day or two for them to get back to me. 

Positive

The initial setup is easy. There is good documentation. I can deploy it within a day or two. There's a page that shows you the health of the agent. It makes me more comfortable knowing that my configuration is healthy. 

I did the deployment myself. 

We have definitely realized ROI through the protection Umbrella offers. 

The pricing is decent. The price is user-based, per month. 

I would rate Cisco Umbrella a nine out of ten. I also use it on a personal level. It helps me to protect my endpoints so that they won't go to a malicious site. 

I'm doing business for customers. I'm building customer networks. We have Cisco Umbrella and Cisco Secure Endpoint, and the use case is that we connect to the company network from all over the place, and we need to do it in a secure way. 

We are just a small company with about 300 employees. Everybody is using these products to securely connect to the corporate network. From there, we support our customers. It needs to be really secure so that no security problems spread from our network to the customers' network. This is something we absolutely need to avoid. That's why these products are really good for us.

For me, it's quite good for daily work. Mainly, I work from a home office, so I have it running all day. It's okay for me. There is not much noise about it. I don't need to pay a lot of attention to this. It's just running in the background, and that's what I need.

It enables mobile work from anywhere. If you are at home, at a customer, or traveling, it enables a secure way of accessing the corporate network.

As a user, everything is there for securing our infrastructure from end to end to detect and remediate threats. There's nothing else that I need.

It saves time for sure. It doesn't require much attention. Everybody can use it. The end-users don't need to have any special skills. It's just perfect. I don't have the metrics on time savings because it isn't easy to know how much time you would have spent if you had an unstable product or if you had to take care of all this. 

For me, it's important that I get a connection to my corporate network in a secure and fast way. This product just runs in the background and doesn't need any attention. For me, as a user, it's perfect. 

Overall, I'm quite happy with Cisco products, but there could be one place where you can check what's going on. There could be one place where you get all the information about these products so that you don't need to look around. You get the status, information about what lately happened, and if there was anything on the machine in one single place.

We've been using Cisco Umbrella for about a year and a half, and we've been using Cisco Secure Endpoint for somewhat longer. It has been about three years.

I haven't been in touch with them because it's just working.

We used other products such as separate virus scanners. Using all the products from Cisco simplified things. You don't need to worry about whether it's compatible or whether you need to do something special on the antivirus side. It simplified things for me.

I work for customers, and this was set up by our internal IT department. 

I would advise seriously looking into it because, for our users, it's just working perfectly. 

I would rate it a 10 out of 10. There are no complaints.

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.

We use Cisco Umbrella for DNS security. We also have the roaming clients deployed on user laptops.

We use it for roaming clients. We also push all our DNS traffic to Umbrella. We do not allow any other DNS traffic. That is kind of how we have fully implemented Umbrella.

We were looking to bridge the gap for DNS security, especially for mobile clients. We wanted to be able to put that roaming client on their PCs and kind of bring that together.

It has improved our organization from a security posture perspective. We feel more confident now knowing that we can block phishing attempts or any type of malware that is DNS-related. This is a very nice feature that provides peace of mind.

Umbrella has absolutely helped us remediate threats more quickly. In fact, it has blocked a lot of threats that may have been able to go through in some instances. Knowing that they are blocking it and being able to find the PC that potentially has the threat on it, that has been very beneficial.

Umbrella has been very good for employee morale. It makes our job a little bit easier.

Cybersecurity resilience is very important for our organization right now. Umbrella does a good job of blocking ransomware, malware, bad threat actors, and phishing attempts.

Being able to control policy sets has been a very nice feature. Being able to have appliances that are separate, where we can send DNS traffic, has been very beneficial as well.

It is a good product for helping workers feel safe, secure, supported, and included. Having the roaming client is probably one of the key factors in being able to do that.

Cisco Umbrella provides single-pane-of-glass management, which is pretty important for my organization. We have a lot of products, including security products, that we manage. Being able to see a lot of those data sets in a single pane of glass is very beneficial for my team. We enjoy having it. It is very easy to use.

It is not very difficult to maintain network connectivity. 

We would like them to add more features to Cisco Umbrella.

We have been using Umbrella for about four years.

Stability has been great. Obviously, there have been some hiccups here and there on the connectivity side. That is out of our control, but it is understandable, as things are in the cloud. I have had more issues with Amazon than I have had issues with Umbrella, where I have had a very good experience.

It is very scalable. If I had more sites, all I would have to do is deploy more VMs and point traffic that way, which is very nice.

We are using roaming clients. We are also using the DNS appliances that we have deployed. I have over 15,000 users and 10 locations. We have deployed each appliance at every location, and then point traffic to that. There are 20 different servers that we are using for Umbrella.

The technical support has been very good. I have not had to open many tickets. I have only opened two in the five years that we have had it. Those two times, the support was very nice and supportive. I would rate them as 10 out of 10.

Positive

We have actually been using Umbrella since it came out. Previously, we just ran our own DNS. From a security product perspective, Umbrella has been the only DNS solution that we've used.

The initial setup is very straightforward. There is a lot of documentation available.

It was deployed in-house.

We have seen ROI. We can show our leadership that we are blocking and preventing things from coming into our network. Not only that, but from a threat perspective, if any of those things were able to infiltrate, then possibly the remediation damages would be way more than the cost that I am paying for Umbrella today.

As an educational partner, we get better licensing structures. We are very happy with that. It has been very nice that Cisco has partnered with the educational sector to bring that. 

Look for all the gaps that you have in your network, then try to find a product that is more rounded to essentially fill those gaps.

I would rate Umbrella as 10 out of 10.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Also, the policies are not that easy to manage.

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

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

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

We have never requested support.

The initial deployment was straightforward.

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

We did it all by ourselves.

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

The pricing is pretty fair. It's good.

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

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

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

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

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

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