We compared Cisco Umbrella and Versa Unified Secure Access Service Edge (SASE) Platform across several parameters based on our user's reviews. After reading the collected data, you can find our conclusion below:
The Versa Unified Secure Access Service Edge (SASE) Platform is preferred over Cisco Umbrella due to its comprehensive feature set, including firewall, VPN, and secure web gateway. Users highlight its ability to seamlessly integrate with existing networking infrastructures, as well as its superior performance and scalability. Versa SASE Platform offers advanced security analytics and AI-driven automation, ensuring better threat detection and mitigation capabilities compared to Cisco Umbrella.
"The most valuable features are the antivirus as a whole, the anti-malware, and all of the protection features that scan our enterprise devices."
"The protection offered by the product is the most valuable feature. It detects vulnerabilities or traps on our users' phones and then prompts them to clean up their devices. Tools we used previously would only discover, which required us to gather information on the backend, so Lookout is a welcome upgrade."
"On the outside, the main differentiation is because Lookout ingest. They have ingested basically all of the apps for the last ten years and all the versions of all the apps, and we have that in a corporate database that allows us to do very large-scale machine learning and analysis on that data set. That's not something that any of the competitors really have the capability to do because they don't have access to the data set. A lot of the apps you can no longer get them because that version of the app is five or six years old, and it just doesn't exist anywhere anymore, except within our infrastructure. So, the ability to have that very rich dataset and learn from that dataset is a real differentiator."
"The solution is stable."
"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."
"It analyzes the domain security helps us implement the securest policy."
"Cisco Umbrella is such a solution and can be implemented very fast and easy. All that we must do is redirect the DNS registers in their routers, or the active directory service of the enterprise that are going to use in Umbrella services. If you buy the service now, in two hours you are protected by the service because it's very fast to put in service."
"It is user-friendly. It is easy to manage the solution."
"The solution is extremely stable. It has excellent performance."
"Helps block personal email accounts."
"It has the ability to quickly block new threats."
"I like the original functionality, which allows for providing secure DNS services."
"Overall, it's nice and very user friendly. That's what makes it so successful. They give you complicated features but with a very simple user interface, and that's been a big success for them."
"Versa is a good centralized solution, where you're setting up your infrastructure in a data center type thing."
"The most valuable aspects of the solution are the next-generation firewall features and geo-blocking capabilities."
"The product has a dynamic VPN feature for SD-WAN."
"Our customers are very satisfied with this solution. They have not mentioned any areas for improvement."
"The flexibility is a great feature."
"Our organization finds the application routing features extremely useful."
"It is very easy to deploy. The GUI interface is really good, and the security features are also very good. It is also stable and scalable, and their support is also good."
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"We just submitted an enhancement request reflecting the main area we want to see improvement in; the APIs. Currently, we're able to build dashboards, but it's somewhat backward because we use our MDM API to create them. Lookout should provide API to customers so we can query our data and use it in our cloud, and this is the only outstanding area for improvement with the product right now."
"The stability depends on the service from where you access it. Because sometimes, the place you are in, you have Gateway. You don't have Gateway. The gateway is overutilized. At the end, you need to go through their gateways. And this is the key point here. You have a tracking point. If it's not well orchestrated, and it scales up as you add more to the existing team, you will suffer"
"Lookout was moving into the SSE space. And so their work on SecureWeb Gateway and SD-WAN is still sort of evolving."
"From the analysis that we've done, they do seem to be maybe a step behind in trying to enter the market with a new solution. But when they do pick up, they do come out with some good products."
"With any Cisco product, it's the licensing side of things that needs improvement."
"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 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."
"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'd like to see improvement in its overall integration with all the other platforms. There's some integration between Umbrella and Meraki, but an overall Cisco problem is that there are so many different tools, and finding easy, seamless ways of connecting everything together is always a challenge."
"In the next release, I would like to see the integration of VDI NSX with Cisco Umbrella."
"There are a couple of interface issues. I know that they say that there are feature enhancements that are noted. For example, we've got the Cisco Meraki security appliances, and there, we geofence our company to where we're allowed to send and receive traffic. So, in our case, by default, we only allow traffic to six different countries, which allows us to effectively prevent traffic for the majority of bad players in the world, but they don't give you an easy way to do that in Cisco Umbrella. With Cisco Meraki, I can specify or pick the countries. I can say that I want to only allow traffic from these six countries, and I'm done. With Cisco Umbrella, I have to rely on the fact that they're going to prevent traffic to other countries. They're going to decide if it's good or bad."
"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."
"It had the ability to do a lot of app control. So, every single app that went through that portal was registered, but there is a general issue with the whole app control. As soon as you add a mobile phone to your network, all of the apps get registered through the system, and you can approve, reject, or just let them go through. When I looked at it, it was impossible to manage app control. There was just so much data. I didn't apply that service because I just didn't have the time to manage it. It would be good if there was a way to categorize applications."
"I heard about them for the first time just before I started working on Versa. They do have blogs for information, but they could publicize more about the documentation and architecture. It doesn't seem to have that much exposure, and they should work on their customer base more."
"The solution's current customer support is not that good. So, they need to improve that. Also, the solution's UI is quite complex, so they need to simplify it."
"We are thinking about how to make customers consolidate the loads to an SD-WAN network so that the customers can have bigger chunk from the SD-WAN side so that customers can have critical data be transferred with NPS VPN and non-critical data or some labeled traffic can be transferred by the SD-WAN network. I think it's a very important direction for digital transformation."
"The solution lacks a mobile version where small, manageable platforms can be developed."
"The web interface can be improved."
"With the pandemic and changing work models, it would be ideal if the product more accessibility options or more diversity within the solution itself."
"The security should be improved."
"The smaller units lack a lot of functionality."
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Cisco Umbrella is ranked 2nd in Secure Access Service Edge (SASE) with 108 reviews while Versa Unified Secure Access Service Edge (SASE) Platform is ranked 13th in Secure Access Service Edge (SASE) with 20 reviews. Cisco Umbrella is rated 8.8, while Versa Unified Secure Access Service Edge (SASE) Platform is rated 8.0. The top reviewer of Cisco Umbrella writes "Protects endpoints wherever they are, always pushing people to the right locations to avoid malicious intent". On the other hand, the top reviewer of Versa Unified Secure Access Service Edge (SASE) Platform writes "A flexible, stable and scalable solution ". Cisco Umbrella is most compared with Zscaler Internet Access, Microsoft Defender for Cloud Apps, Prisma Access by Palo Alto Networks, Palo Alto Networks DNS Security and Fortinet FortiGate SWG, whereas Versa Unified Secure Access Service Edge (SASE) Platform is most compared with Cisco SD-WAN, Fortinet FortiGate, VMware SD-WAN, Cato SASE Cloud Platform and Juniper Session Smart Router. See our Cisco Umbrella vs. Versa Unified Secure Access Service Edge (SASE) Platform report.
See our list of best Secure Access Service Edge (SASE) vendors.
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