We performed a comparison between Cisco Umbrella and Microsoft Defender for Cloud Apps based on our users’ reviews in five categories. After reading all of the collected data, you can find our conclusion below.
Comparison Results: Cisco Umbrella comes out on top in this comparison. It is easy to use and high performing. In addition, Cisco Umbrella’s support received better marks than Microsoft Defender’s.
"One valuable feature is definitely its simplicity in terms of deployment. It is very easy to integrate it into the environment without any heavy lifting. Users didn't notice that we implemented it. You can start with a very low monitoring mode and start observing what Cisco Umbrella sees."
"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."
"The most valuable features for us include tenant lock, content filtering, and DLP solutions, looking for PII and information being exfiltrated."
"We are very new users of the solution and are still in the exploration stages, but we are happy with the product thus far."
"It is user-friendly. It is easy to manage the solution."
"I was able to implement it myself. It was really easy to install. You could install it on a server locally if you want to. If you have the biggest site, you would do that, but for my site, it was just directing all the traffic out through the Cisco Umbrella DNS. It was really handy. When the owners of the company went overseas, I knew that they would be secure because even if they were not on the company network, they would still go through the Cisco Umbrella servers. It was a complete solution for protecting the company with outgoing data."
"The documentation is good, and we have been able to resolve any issues ourselves."
"You can manage and create policies based on a group of users. It can permit some URLs and block others."
"The most valuable feature of this solution is its monitoring."
"The most valuable feature of Microsoft Defender for Cloud Apps is to stop shadow IT."
"There are a lot of features with benefits, including discovery, investigation, and putting controls around things. You can't say that you like the investigation part but not the discovery. Everything is correlated; that's how the tool works."
"The feature that helps us in detecting the sensitive information being shared has been very useful. In addition, the feature that allows MCAS to apply policies with SharePoint, Teams, and OneDrive is being used predominantly."
"One of the most valuable features is auditing. Some of the other protection services have issues with auditing. Microsoft Defender for Cloud has an excellent auditing technique that helps us avoid the risk of filtering or information loss. You can use different tools to guarantee these things. It allows you to conduct an in-depth exploration of applications, users, and files that are harmful or suspicious. You can also enhance your security setup by creating personalized rules or policies that help you better control traffic in the cloud."
"On-demand scanning is the most valuable feature. In addition, it's a fairly fluid product. It syncs back to the cloud and provides metrics. It's pretty intelligent."
"Threat detection is its key feature, and that's why we use this tool. It gives an alert if a PC is attacked or there is any kind of anomaly, such as there is a spike in sending emails or we see an unauthorized website being accessed. So, it keeps us on our toes. We get to know that there is something wrong, and we can isolate the user and find any issues with it. So, threat detection is very robust in this tool."
"If your business requirements are relatively simple, it can get the job done."
"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."
"We would like them to add more features to Cisco Umbrella."
"The integration with Cisco could be better."
"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."
"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."
"In my experience with Umbrella support, sometimes the response times take a bit more time than we would like... sometimes, if you go through email, it can take quite a while to get a response."
"They should provide more integrations and bring things together so that there is a more standard feel to their platform. We also use Cisco ISE, and it has a very different feel from Cisco Umbrella."
"Its price could be better."
"The integration with macOS operating systems needs to be better."
"There are challenges with detection and there are challenges with false-positive rates."
"There are some features, such as user navigation content filtering, that are disabled by default, and it probably makes sense to enable them by default."
"Defender for Cloud Apps could come with more configured policies out of the box. Also, integration could be easier. Integration is moderately difficult because Microsoft hasn't developed a solution that unifies device onboarding and management. You have to use Intune to manage devices and Defender for Endpoint to enforce policies. They need to fix their integration, but I believe they will straighten it out by the end of the year."
"We sometimes get errors when we create policies, which is somewhat annoying because some policies stop working due to misconfigurations. We find this challenging because it limits our options for troubleshooting an issue."
"I would like to see them include more features in the older licenses. There are some features that are not available, such as preventing or analyzing cloud attacks."
"Sometimes, we'll get false positive alarms. For example, when a SharePoint path has no file sharing, but there is an external user, it will trigger an alarm that the file has been shared with an external user... the alerting mechanism should be more precise when giving you an alert about what activity has been done with the file..."
"Microsoft Defender for Cloud Apps' initial setup was quite technical but we were prepared. The time of the implementation depends on the job and how many users are being set up."
More Microsoft Defender for Cloud Apps Pricing and Cost Advice →
Cisco Umbrella is ranked 1st in Cloud Access Security Brokers (CASB) with 47 reviews while Microsoft Defender for Cloud Apps is ranked 3rd in Cloud Access Security Brokers (CASB) with 19 reviews. Cisco Umbrella is rated 8.8, while Microsoft Defender for Cloud Apps is rated 8.4. The top reviewer of Cisco Umbrella writes "We can see all of our locations in one place and only have to make changes once for all our locations". On the other hand, the top reviewer of Microsoft Defender for Cloud Apps writes "Integrates well and helps us in protecting sensitive information, but takes time to scan and apply the policies and cannot detect everything we need". Cisco Umbrella is most compared with Zscaler Internet Access, Palo Alto Networks DNS Security, Prisma Access by Palo Alto Networks, Fortinet FortiGate SWG and Infoblox Advanced DNS Protection, whereas Microsoft Defender for Cloud Apps is most compared with Zscaler Internet Access, Netskope , Qualys VMDR, Prisma Access by Palo Alto Networks and Infoblox Advanced DNS Protection. See our Cisco Umbrella vs. Microsoft Defender for Cloud Apps report.
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