Cisco Umbrella Reviews

Cisco is a very efficient and on-point solution that controls the whole network and settings on one page. We can monitor the entire network.

The solution could be faster as the process is very slow.

I have been using Cisco Umbrella as a reseller for four to five years.

I rate the solution’s stability an eight and a half out of ten.

We have deployed it to small businesses.

I rate the solution’s scalability an eight out of ten.

The initial setup is straightforward and takes few hours to complete.

I rate the initial setup a nine out of ten, where one is difficult, and ten is easy.

ROI is pretty good. I rate it as eight out of ten.

You need to buy an additional license for customer services. The licensing is moderate.

I recommend the solution.

Overall, I rate the solution as eight and a half 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.

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.

One of the main use cases of Cisco Umbrella kicked in during the COVID pandemic, as a SASE deployment—secure access, secure edge. Most of the users within a company started working from outside the company and that is when Umbrella became deployed a lot.

One of the most important features is the security posture check which Umbrella offers when a user accesses any website. That is one of the most unique features that it offers.

I would like to see hardware-based integrations. If a hardware platform were provided for Umbrella, that would definitely improve the market for it. The solution is pretty good, but if a hardware-based solution came through, it would meet all the compliance standards in my country.

Especially when we are addressing governmental customers, they hesitate to connect to the cloud. That is where we need a hardware platform so that the solution can be used on-premises as well.

I have been deploying Cisco Umbrella for about five years.

It's quite stable. I've gotten very positive feedback from the customers who have deployed it within their environment. The feedback has been amazing. It's up and running 99.9 percent of the time, since it's a cloud-based solution. We have had no problems related to bugs or any issues like that.

It is very scalable. Although I'm not talking to the clients anymore, I'm sure that the organization I worked with is working with them to spread the solution to more users who were not covered in the initial deployment. There is an adoption roadmap for this product.

Technical support is included as part of the subscription. At any point in time, if you have any queries, there's a 24/7 TAC number available. You can just call and log a case.

I'm also very satisfied with the documentation provided for the solution.

Positive

The previous solution we used was Akamai, but Akamai was more costly compared to Umbrella, and the consumption model was not favorable. Cisco Umbrella cost at least 30 percent less compared to what Akamai offered.

One of the key aspects of Umbrella is the deployment. It takes a matter of just 30 minutes to deploy it in any enterprise and, as soon as it is deployed, it starts to work, so it is seamless. The benefits are realized immediately.

The implementation strategy is pretty straightforward. On the customer's existing hardware you just have to make the entries that will enable the connection to Umbrella and it starts to run. It's a single-person deployment, a single network engineer. That is the beauty of it; you don't require a huge team to deploy it.

Umbrella doesn't require any maintenance. All the updates happen automatically. The configuration is a one-time process.

It can be deployed on the public cloud and private cloud. These are two of the selling factors, although public cloud is more common. It's a multi-location solution but can also be used by a single headquarters. On average, our deployments are for 2,000 endpoints.

If you look at the ROI, Umbrella significantly reduces investment in hardware-based firewalls. For example, typically, an enterprise has to refresh its firewalls every five years. By using Umbrella, they don't have to change their firewalls, rather the security posture is shifted to a cloud-based provider.

There are no hidden costs with Umbrella. Everything is included in the package.

Other than Akamai, there weren't many providers available in India.

One important piece of advice would be to look at your existing framework and see which use cases Umbrella can address. That will make the adoption much easier.

Umbrella is the best product available as of now. 

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 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.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

A single pane of glass saves time. It saves effort and the headache of having to open up multiple links and go to different dashboards for troubleshooting different areas. This does have a lot of options available for us to see who's doing what, what trends, what errors. We can set up our alerting through it as well. It is definitely a great dashboard.

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

So far, I haven't seen any areas that need improvement. As far as what we need it to do, it's doing just that. It's comfortable for us. It's working beyond our expectations. Something on our end that might make it better is alerting going to our ticketing system. It's not something that we have discussed, but that would be a proactive option for us to provide a learning experience for the staff.

We've had Umbrella implemented for about two years.

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

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

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

Positive

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

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

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

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

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

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

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