Cisco Umbrella Reviews

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.

We are a Cisco premier integrator, and I've worked for Prosperity for approximately seven months now. We just set up a new networking team predominantly servicing clients within the financial services industry.

We offer various products within the Cisco Secure product line, for example, Cisco Secure Firewall, AnyConnect, and Umbrella. As a Cisco partner, we predominantly deploy Cisco equipment, be it LAN switching or routers. Deploying Cisco Secure products makes sense because then we have one vendor in the network.

When we're deploying Cisco Umbrella, we're predominantly utilizing the DNS Essentials or the DNS Advantage license. We use it as a first layer of defense on the network because everything relies on DNS these days, so if you can capture that traffic and analyze it or analyze those DNS requests, you can very quickly start filtering out things like Command-and-Control and whether there's malware on the environments or shadow IT, for example. So, it can capture and categorize the apps that people use, and if you were to block something, you can very easily block it.

As a Cisco partner, the value we bring to our customers is our years of experience, and our customers can rely on us. We've got a saying in our company that if we look after our clients, we look after our colleagues, and we look after our customers, then we'll all prosper; hence the name Prosperity 24/7. That's our sort of motto, but it's very true. Our customers can trust us. We've got the experience. We've got the links to Cisco. We do all the training, so customers don't have to worry. It's about wrapping the customer up in a blanket and going, "Everything's going to be okay. We're here."

The benefit we get from our Cisco partnership is credibility within the marketplace because everybody has heard of Cisco, and it's probably one of the most deployed network manufacturers in the world involved in so many verticals. There's always a product there. I've been looking at so many products this week at Cisco Live, for example, that anything you can think of is there. There's always new innovation. It's an innovative company.

The feature that we find most valuable is to be able to filter out those web requests that you don't want. In a corporate environment, it can be damaging. It can be damaging to organizations as well. You don't want people going to certain sites. Also, the malware side of things and the Command-and-Control side of things are valuable because you can have serious reputational damage to your organization if there's malware in your environment. To be able to block that at its source is very important.

Umbrella is a constantly evolving product set in terms of what they had maybe four years ago compared to now. The number of features they're developing and facilities within that cloud platform are amazing. Things like data loss prevention (DLP) have been released in the last couple of years. It probably has remote browser isolation (RBI) as well, but I'll have to check that one. So, it's a constantly evolving product set. Our clients might start off on a lower tier of the Umbrella, but over time, they'll go, "Actually I want that feature." And then they'll go from DNS Essentials to DNS Advantage, and then they might start looking at Secure Internet Gateway (SIG), for example, which is just the secure web gateway (SWG). So, there's something for everybody, and as a layer of defense in your network, it's a great product.

With any Cisco product, it's the licensing side of things that needs improvement. Licensing changes and Cisco typically doesn't make it easy for us, but it does evolve. What's good now is that predominantly across the different product sectors within Cisco, you start off with DNS Essentials, Advantage, and even the Catalyst switches. That's now ubiquitous across the Cisco line. They've got to keep it simple on the licensing side so that when I go and talk to clients, I can say, "Right, here you go. With this license, you get these features, but you can always scale up." Once the customers experience Cisco Umbrella, then typically, they start thinking, "What else could I be doing?" You may start off with the DNS Essentials, but then you might move to SWG eventually.

Umbrella's availability is second to none. I remember attending Cisco Live in Barcelona where I went to one of the sessions, and they said that they've had a hundred percent uptime since forever basically, so I don't think they ever had an outage. They've got two DNS servers. They use Anycast, so it's available around the world. It will speed up your web browsing because you'll go to the closest data center. Umbrella pairs with the service providers, so it'll speed up your general web traffic as well.

In our customers' environments, in terms of scalability, absolutely, it's a very simple product to deploy. It's cloud-based, so we don't have to worry about deploying resources locally. Networks rely on DNS anyway. The whole Microsoft stack, whether you open a web browser or use Teams, relies on DNS. So, it's the first step in any web transaction.

I like working with Cisco products because I get excellent support. If it's four o'clock in the morning, I'm in a data center, and something has stopped working, I know I can just reach out to TAC, raise a TAC case, and get help. That's a comfort blanket that surrounds all of us Cisco engineers. We know we can call somebody, and we know we can get through to somebody who will have the answers for us.

I would give Cisco support a solid eight or nine. It's probably difficult to give a 10 because sometimes it depends on who you get as well, but with Cisco TAC, you can always escalate cases as well. So, there's always somebody within Cisco TAC who can help you.

Positive

In the typical deployment model, we integrate it with, for example, the Meraki product line for using Cisco Umbrella directly within the Meraki dashboard. So, you can link it to an API. That's a nice integration. You're not having separate Meraki access points or Meraki MX. You can bring it all together in one place, so you've got a single dashboard. Typically, we've done that. In the bigger organizations, we have done deployments of the virtual appliances because essentially, you want to be able to identify individual users at that point. By using the VAs, you should be able to identify users on the network, and then you can deploy policies based on those user groups.

Cisco Umbrella can be deployed in minutes. In its simplest form, all you need to do is point at the Cisco Umbrella DNS servers, and that's it. It can be literally deployed in minutes. If you want to go to a different use case, for example, where you've got to deploy VAs, that's a bit more difficult, but there's something for everybody. It can be as simple or as complex as your environment requires.

I've always worked with Cisco. I've been working with Cisco products for the last 20 years. We do have other products that we can sell for a lower price point, for example, but typically, I like using Cisco products.

To any customers who want to evaluate Umbrella, the first thing I would recommend looking at would be the product sheets within Cisco. Understand the technology, understand the features that are available, and then decide what level of Umbrella or what licensing level you require to meet your business requirements. If it's just protecting some guest WiFis, for example, then it'll be a very simple deployment. If you've got Meraki kits, you can easily link those two pieces together.

Talos receives so much traffic. I did one of the sessions yesterday with the guys from Talos, and the amount of web traffic that comes into Talos for them to analyze is huge. So, as a repository of what's going on and a view of what's going on the Internet with this new malware, they're very quickly going to be able to react to that. Even with just the behavioral type analysis in terms of what constitutes bad behavior on a network, they can very quickly analyze and deploy a new solution. They update things like Umbrella, and as a central repository, it feeds into Talos, and then Talos can inform the rest of the security community about what's going on and what things you might need to block, so Talos overall has a positive effect for our clients. For them to do it themselves would be impossible. You need somebody on the Internet, and Talos provide that service. It's about control and visibility, and those certainly are the features that Talos can bring to the table.

I'd rate Umbrella a solid nine out of ten. It's probably difficult to get any product in a 10, but they are always constantly developing it. So, if you come back in a year's time, there'll always be new features than what's available today.

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

Clients implement Umbrella with the full proxy. 

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

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

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

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

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

We are resellers and integrators.

The stability is getting better.

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

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

Positive

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Cisco Talos seems to be working fine for our customers. 

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

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

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

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

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

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

Its price could be better.

I've been using it for about two years.

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

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

Positive

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Positive

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Cisco Umbrella is stable. 

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

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

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

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

Positive

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Cisco Umbrella has not caused our organization to consolidate tools.

We are using it for user navigation. We have another solution for the server, and Umbrella is used for the people in the company for web access and security purposes. It helps to avoid security problems and authorize different types of access to the users for different web services. 

I am a network administrator, and for me, it is the best solution because it is easy to manage. It is also effective for web access for the users.

With the old solution, we had a lot of restrictions because it was old technology and it was very important to provide different types of access. Umbrella is a cloud solution, and we can add access to new services or websites. It is a good product.

It is totally transparent for the users. When you have Cisco Umbrella on your computer, you cannot really see the product. It is very important for the users to not see the product.

It is very easy to manage, which is really important. We do not have time to manage this solution, and it is really important to have a good performance without any action or monitoring from my team. We work with Umbrella every day, but we don't need to make any changes on Umbrella because it is working.

It is easy to maintain network connectivity consistently across all workplaces, and it has been a good experience for our employees.

It provides resilience on all the sites. We have five sites, and all the sites have Umbrella.

It is user-friendly. It is easy to manage the solution. 

Their support should be improved. It is necessary that the support is efficient. It is not really easy to get a resolution for an issue from Cisco support. They should be faster and more efficient.

I have been using this solution for about three to four years.

It is very stable. I do not have a problem with this. We only had one bug three months ago, and we had a problem with the support, but before that, it has been a good experience.

It is scalable. We deployed it on different sites of the company. We use it for a lot of different services. 

We have about 600 users, but we have 1,000 licenses. We might increase its usage.

Cisco Umbrella's support is not really efficient. When we have a problem, it is difficult to have good support. It is not really easy to resolve a problem with Cisco support. Three months ago, we had a problem with it, and the support was not very efficient. I would rate them a six out of ten.

Neutral

We had a French solution. It was an old solution, and it was not sufficient for the company. Cisco Umbrella has been the best for our company.

It is not really easy, but because we have experts with us, it was not complex for us. We did this in one month because it was really important to give good services to the users.

We have seen an ROI, but it is hard to provide metrics.

We did a good negotiation, and at the moment, its price is fine.

I didn't look at other options. I only tested Cisco Umbrella.

It has probably helped us to remediate threats more quickly. It is a good solution for user devices but probably not for servers.

I would rate it a seven out of ten.

In my previous company, there was a gap in being able to put controls on users when they were away from the network. We thought, "Okay, Umbrella can do this for us," and it was at a reasonable cost for our security budget.

With Umbrella, it didn't matter if the users were in the office or they were going to go out. When I trained them I said, "If you go to Target, Starbucks, or anywhere else you can get on a hotspot, you're going to be covered with our rules, so we can make sure you're protected and that our company device is protected."

It gave our users, from all of our sites, something like a first line of defense, including monitoring all the exit points of our offices. We also used Cisco AnyConnect on everybody's laptop so that any time they were out, we were making sure to secure their machine and keep an eye on it.

Having a single pane of glass allowed us to quickly monitor and find out what was happening at that moment. We could see active connections going to a public address on the internet. At one point there were so many of them, thousands and thousands to one public address, which was more than normal. I had to contact Cisco support, and say, "This is what I'm seeing. Something's not right," and they said, "You're right." In the main screen, we switched over to investigation and we found that it was a bad actor. The bad actor was checking for domains that are flying around, and he found a few of ours that weren't paid for. He bought them and then he started controlling where they were going by redirecting them. That raised a big red flag for our company. They never had any idea that that had been going on for a very long time.

There were other bad actors who had some of our domain names as well. I had to work with legal and we actually purchased back a few domain names from people. As a result, we taught our guys internally, "When you do a domain and you're going to do tests in the lab, make sure that we put purchase orders in. It's so cheap, let's buy them so that we have control of them, and not allow this again." That was a big awakening.

Another benefit of Cisco Umbrella was related to our wireless. If we had a vendor come to our company, I'd have to get permission for him to use our wireless. I'd have to put in a ticket with his machine name, the IP he would have, and ask for a two-hour window. But I could tell that vendor, "In the same way that you are helping us with the product we purchased from your company, we're going to help protect you at no charge. When you get on our wireless, we're going to have it set up so that everything you do is monitored, just like everybody else here in the company. Even though you don't work for our company, you'll be protected and that will help protect us." They would stare at me, and I'd say, "I know a lot of companies don't do that, but we're doing that because we want to make sure you have a good experience and that we have a good experience by staying safe."

I was able to make use of Cisco Umbrella because it acts like a proxy. The company also had content security, which I used on-prem with Blue Coat products. Any time someone went off the network, the AnyConnect client had the Umbrella agent built in, and it would realize when their computer connected that they were not on the corporate network. It would monitor and they would have pretty close to the same rules that they had to follow when they were in the office, regarding what kind of website browsing they could do.

The single pane of glass management was one of the really good features. From that single pane, not only could you look at what was happening security-wise, such as what was being blocked by domains and IPs, but you could check for your roaming users. With a deployment of AnyConnect, or just the Umbrella agent, on 5,000 machines, you could watch the main glass and see how many roaming users were out there that had it on their machines. And even if they were in the office, it was always active, talking to Cisco's cloud.

You could see numbers. I was able to watch, as we were deploying, how many people were getting the agent. I could see activity such as how many blocks we were getting, what types of blocks they were, and whether they were in categories. I would ask why those users were going to those categories that they shouldn't be going to. Maybe we needed to just refresh them with an email saying, "Hey, remember, we don't do this kind of thing."

Cisco's Umbrella client product is superb. It worked so well for us and was easy to deploy.

The design of the screens could be improved. Sometimes you're trying to look for information, for what you think is critical that should be on that first screen of the dashboard so that you can quickly take screenshots to have people help out, but you have to hop between screens to find little pieces of evidence.

They should work with their customers to find out, when they're troubleshooting, if they're going through multiple screens just to get little pieces of information. Maybe they could design an overall security screen for an event and pull that stuff in so that it's on one screen, rather than having to go search for it. Right now, you're always going back and looking on the left-hand side, going down the column, and trying to remember where something you need is. You have to click all over the place to go find what you're looking for.

I used it at my previous company for about four years.

It was always up. We never had any problems. It was always there.

Scaling was very simple. Since we were using a VPN, we had Cisco AnyConnect on all the user machines, with Umbrella built into it, and that deployment was just blasted out and it was seamless.

The Cisco Umbrella support group was wonderful; very strong. I loved it. I never had one issue with them. They were willing to be there with us, and walk us through things every bit of the way.

Positive

We didn't have a whole lot going on in terms of security and when I got a new manager, he asked, "How do we protect the people when they're out in a store?" That's when we saw that's where the flaw was. We were protecting everything on-prem but the gap we found was that when users were traveling around, we were not seeing where they were going. We were holding them to a standard internally, but when they were outside they were doing whatever they wanted.

What a simple product. It's a fast deployment. Then, you can start designing how you want to do your policies and what you're going to block. But once we told them what public addressing they were going to see, within a few hours we would see them go green. We said, "It's already seeing the data. Let's start applying policies, and we can start controlling all this."

We looked at metrics. As I mentioned, one of the benefits we received was finding the bad actors who had collected our domains that weren't paid for. That helped us to put the magnifying glass to use and say, "Hey, we have something going on." 

I also worked with an outside company that Cisco purchased. I sent them our data from Umbrella and they actually mapped out our data and found bots on our network. There weren't many, but there were a few. The guy shared that with me on the screen and said, "If you buy the service to have us be part of your Cisco deployment, we'll take your data, continually analyze it, and give you reports." 

There was one bot in particular that was just sitting there. The guy at the other company said, "That bot that you're seeing, it's asleep. Look again in a few hours," and it popped up. He said, "It just woke up at that point to try to do a command call." He said, "But we're blocking them, so you're not getting any threats." We didn't know that we had bots in there, and that was a big benefit.

I also had to run numbers for reports. One of them looked at our category-blocking on Umbrella, such as blocks of alcohol sites, social media, weapons, government. I would provide monthly reports to show how many blocks we had from our users trying to go to these types of categories, and it really woke up management: "Wow. That thing is blocking." 

Our investment in this worked, and we were showing it by numbers. It wasn't only that we found bots and bad actors, but we were also controlling things  by blocking phishing and categories. It was protecting us and no one was able to get past those blocks.

The pricing was marvelous. We only had to pay for licenses and they worked a very nice deal with us. It was a much better way to go because it was within budget. It was an easy cost for us to handle.

We did not evaluate any other options. We invited Cisco to come in and do a demonstration, and it was so strong. I also come from a Cisco background of many years. In addition, the industry reviews rated them very well and we took that as our lead.

When they came in and showed us what they could do and how easy it was to monitor every one of our sites within a day, after we put in our external public addresses, it was a no-brainer. It was up and live by the next day, after just a few hours. It was easy to use and set up and we could use it like our internal proxies. We could manage the content and know what was going on and investigate things. We knew what sites people were going to. It was wonderful. Everything we needed was there. We didn't have to go any further, and we knew Cisco would have our back.

All the users understood why we were putting the security control in place, to show that not only were they going to be protected at work on company-owned devices, but whenever they would go outside, we were also going to help. We had to mitigate the chances that they would get something on their machines and make sure that we stopped anything that shouldn't come in and affect our network or expose us to anything.

With Cisco Umbrella, employee morale was very high. We hardly had any complaints at all. One of the reasons is that, when doing regular security troubleshooting, we would go to Umbrella as our first line investigation. We might find a domain or IP that was being blocked by Cisco, something they consider a risk. We would check it out and if it didn't look to be bad we could bypass the block and allow that AD group or set of users to go to that site, because they had to do business as usual. With that ability, we had very few problems, if at all. Overall, it was smooth, with everybody happy, including management. They were happy that we had our first line of defense and that it worked out very well.

I introduce Umbrella to any company that I'm involved with. Cisco is already taking the correct steps right now, as a CASB for any cloud activity as well as DLP. Once they circled around to help companies with protection when they move to the cloud, that was the right direction. I'm not using Umbrella every day anymore, but I'm a proponent of it as a first defense for your company at a reasonable cost. And you don't have hardware to manage. You just rely on Cisco, get your support contract, and work with them to have them help fix things.

I'm a firm believer in Cisco Umbrella and I would definitely use it everywhere I go. I'm speaking to companies in the health industry and telling them, "Guys, you can't just have four people working on security and think you're going to do everything in the world to protect your hospital. You're going to end up on the news." I try to introduce them to this type of solution, to at least have something there to mitigate and help out.

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.