Cisco Umbrella Reviews

Cisco has its own cloud that they manage Umbrella on. So Umbrella is not like any part of AWS or Azure or GPP. Our use case for Umbrella all depends on our customer's requirements. Cisco Umbrella has many packages to help address these requirements. The current package which we are working on incorporating more is Cisco Umbrella SIG, which is the Secure Internet Gateway. It has just been launched as part of Umbrella and we are currently exploring its capabilities and utility for our clients.  

There are a lot of use cases for Umbrella, and for us those use cases include the following:  

• One of the more important use cases for clients is using the product as a web proxy.  
  
• A second thing would be a situation where a customer wants to block access to an employee's personal email account and allow only corporate email accounts.  
  
• A third would be the cloud-delivered firewall. This would cover a situation where a customer would create a tunnel between their on-prem firewall to the Cisco Umbrella cloud. This would make it so that all the traffic is filtered by the Cisco Cloud Firewall.  
  
• We use it to support our MDM (Mobile Device Management) integration. Umbrella can be integrated with various MDM products, like AirWatch and MobileIron, and that category of products.  
  
• Umbrella supports family integrations. So we can search for information from AWS or Azure-based clouds and we can create family-based policies using Umbrella.  
  
• Umbrella provides support for some features of Kaspersky. For example, it can tell you what all apps are running on the endpoints and it can give you granular control over those apps.  

These are only a few of the use cases which I think are most important for us and our clients at this time when using Umbrella.  

The most valuable feature which I found in Umbrella is the segmentation of personal accounts from corporate accounts. In order to work with this, Umbrella has a feature where we add the ID of the customer's Gmail account or the Azure account. That ID is then used as a filter to separate access so that only corporate Gmail will be accessible and it can block personal accounts.  

The second very valuable feature is the web proxy part which is effective in determining if a feed may be malicious.  

Data reporting is something I would like to see improved.  

Cisco is currently rolling out data centers for this type of solution. Currently, they do not have data centers everywhere. For example, they do have one in Singapore but they do not have one in India. My clients are in India and they find an issue of slowness in the services from the Singapore data center. Cisco is working on building a data center in India to address the issue but information about the completion of that project are lacking details.  

In the next release of Cisco Umbrella, I would like to see a DLP solution. That could be a feature someone can addon. But it should be a real Data Leakage Prevention solution to more securely handle the data.  

I have been working with Umbrella for around three years now.  

This product is stable and it is very easy also to scale up.  

Usually, a product is really designed for small, medium, or big companies. I think Umbrella is good to serve any size customer. The range could start from 200 users and then you have an interface that can handle anywhere up to 5,000 to 6,000 users. I think anything is possible with Umbrella as far as scaling usage because of the package and licensing options.  

If you want to increase the number of users you just have to inform Cisco to tell them to increase the seat count on Umbrella. We can renew our licenses to be in compliance with the Cisco licensing policy.  

I had worked for Juniper support before and I worked for other tech support teams and I feel that Cisco's type of support is the best. The response time has been right on and then they isolate all of the issues. It is the best product support I have seen in a long time.  

The initial setup is very simple, you can set up Umbrella within two minutes I would say. You just have to point the DNS to Umbrella and that is it. So it is very easy to deploy and set up.  

Actually, I am from the research team. We make the solution requirements, then the product moves on to the process team. Once I have made a solution, then the product team takes care of rolling out the implementation.  

As this solution is a public cloud solution, there is very little maintenance which the customer has left to do. The setup is relatively easy and it is very good for the client.  

The licensing part for Umbrella is really flexible. If a customer purchases a thousand licenses, and if at any point the customer overshoots the available license count, Umbrella would not stop working for the additional users. Cisco would be informed that there is an attempt at overconsumption of the licenses and they would inform the customers that their license count has been increased. It will do this automatically. The customer can take action to renew those licenses. So it is flexible.  

There are three models for licensing. There is the Cisco Umbrella essential plan, then you have the advantage plan, and then they have the plan including SID. Every license comes with a different feature set.  

The advice that I would give someone looking at the Umbrella solution is that they can evaluate Umbrella because it is very easy to set up. You can get started discovering the product and do a little to check it out. They should make sure that all their use cases are covered by Umbrella.  

On a scale from one to ten (where one is the worst and ten is the best), I would rate Cisco Umbrella as somewhere between a seven-point-five to eight, personally. But I will give it a seven overall.  

We use Cisco Umbrella for web security and it's very good. It acts as web filtration combined with security and I am very supportive of it, especially with cybersecurity trending these days and the amount of malware and spyware out there. It's important for end-users to have some sort of protection when they're browsing the internet and this product does that. Before it lets you go, it filters and gives you the okay to move forward with the website you're looking for. A lot of customers tend to make typos when they're searching for websites, which then leads them to unknown websites that automatically download malware to their computer — now they're infected. That's why you need web security. 

We currently have about 1500 endpoints under Cisco Umbrella, but of course, we plan to increase our numbers. We offer Cisco Umbrella in our packages so whenever we get new customers on board, they get it. 

In the past, Cisco Umbrella has denied us access to secure websites. I haven't seen it lately, but they have blocked different legitimate websites. However, they have good tools that allow you to refresh and verify whether a website is legitimate or not. They have so many servers across the United States and even globally. I believe that it helps you to identify a website. 

In other words, the solution is good, we like it and we've been using it. We have a big customer of about 1,200 users and they're happy. The only thing I am not happy with is Cisco themselves. Not because of a technical or support issue, but because a division of Cisco poached one of my clients, stole them from me, which is completely unethical. When I talked to our account managers about it, they said there was nothing they could do about it because it was a different department. I said, "What do you mean different departments? This is my client and you guys went and provided them with a solution that I am already providing them?" So, that was a big deal for me. 

Also, I think Cisco Umbrella has an automatic push feature, which is the automated updating agent, but if I am wrong, they should get it.

I've been using Cisco Umbrella for roughly five years.

We have been using Cisco Umbrella for three years; it's very stable, reliable and does its job. We experience minor hiccups here and there, but it's nothing that our team cannot handle, and if for some reason they cannot, then they can always reach out to customer support.

Cisco Umbrella is very scalable. You can do anything and it's very useful for MSP. It's basically a single window that allows us to manage different servers and different clients. That's the beauty of it, no more logging in and out for different clients, which is nice.

For me personally, I consider Cisco to offer premier support. Currently, due to COVID-19, we cannot call them now for obvious reasons, but prior to COVID-19, Cisco support was one of the best, especially in regards to Umbrella. Honestly, we almost never have to contact them. I don't recall having to contact them even once over the last year or so.

For web filtration, we tried Websense before but now I believe the cloud solution is the way to go, it's much better. We had a customer and they needed to have different layers of protection, especially today with cybersecurity, and open DNS is one of them. I believe it's mandatory that you must have some sort of defense because it's is up in the air, there may be other solutions, but something needs to protect you from going to the wrong websites.

They have different setups. For example, you can integrate with the Cisco Firewall and I believe you can integrate with any platform with an agent, on each device. So, it really depends on how comfortable you feel with the setup. If you need to get more information and analytics, I believe it says the agent is the best way to go. The agent gives you every machine: for example, what has been blocked? What kind of security breaches have been attempted? Open DNS has defended this particular endpoint, but there are definitely many flexible, different integration methods to integrate a solution.

I am not sure, I don't have the numbers in front of me, but I think it's $1.00 or so per device/month.

I like this product and I'd really recommend it to everyone. Obviously, it's not the only product out there, but today, every endpoint should have multiple layers of security. You need to protect your users when they are browsing—open DNS. You need to protect them from emails, both inbound and outbound and you need to protect the endpoint from breaching. 

I would rate Cisco Umbrella a nine out of ten.

We use Cisco Umbrella to provide protection for our end-users. It prevents unauthorized access to their systems, as well as halts access to compromised sites, such as a ransomware site. Essentially, all of the malicious activity is prevented.

The most valuable feature for us is the DNS-based protection. It is the only type that is available in India.

The interface is very easy to handle. Even a person with limited knowledge can quickly learn to work with it.

Deep packet inspection features should be implemented. This solution does not give us full, 360-degree protection.

They should have a local data center available in India.

I have been working with Cisco Umbrella for four months.

I haven't experienced any instability.

This is a highly scalable product.

I have been in contact with the Cisco technical support, once or twice. They were not big issues, however. Overall, I am satisfied with the support.

Prior to Cisco Umbrella, we were using on-premises solutions. The capability is good except that a cloud-based solution can be more easily provided to all of our end-users. 

The initial setup is straightforward and there is no complexity to it. This is a cloud-based system, so just install it, mount it, and the policies get applied. The installation requires that you log into the portal using your ID, and then it just starts working.

Zscaler has a local data center available, which is something that Cisco can't offer us at this time.

This is a good product, although it does not have the features that I was looking for. At this time, it does not have the capabilities that are relevant to the Indian market. As such, we are thinking about uninstalling it and switching products.

The suitability of this solution depends on the industry and requirements. It is important to remember that if you start with a product or approach, you may end up switching to something different. That said, if you want to begin with Cisco Umbrella to deal with malware then you can always change later if it doesn't perfectly fit your environment. This is what we are doing.

If I were rating this product on a single capability then it would do very well. However, rating it on multiple capabilities, then there is definitely room for improvement.

I would rate this solution a six out of ten.

We are using Cisco Umbrella temporarily for DNS security, but we want to migrate to secure the internet gateway, which is what we are working on at the moment.

Cisco Umbrella has improved our organization in the sense that we have more users working from home because of the pandemic. We have a lot of users working outside of the office. 

Cisco Umbrella helps secure our environment more because we've deployed some of our applications to the cloud. Our 365 team applications are running on the cloud. Cisco Umbrella helps protect us by guiding threats in external parameters. 

It's been helpful for us in the sense that we can see and guide what is coming into the enterprise using Cisco Umbrella in the cloud. This is good for users that are working outside of the office environment and working from other remote locations.

I like the DNS layer security.

It would be better if there was a little bit of flexibility for organizations that don't have SD One in their environment. Because of the complexity of the environment, it's not easy to actually turn on the feature of the secure internet gateway for our users. We have not been able to explore that option yet.

I have been using Cisco Umbrella for almost six months.

For stability, I will give it 30%

Scalability is okay. I think it has that functionality. Depending on the perspective of the environment, you can scale to any capacity you want because this is a cloud solution. 

Technical support is okay. 

We had issues with our traditional secure web gateway. Our environment is not entirely SD One supported yet. We had problems with the SWG device for dot com users. We got advice from Cisco that Cisco data can do the same functionality for that. So, we'll be using it.

We were using Broadcom as our secure web, but we had issues with the number of connections that it could handle. That's the setback, and that's why we're opting for the Cisco umbrella solution.

We have a partnership with a company here, and we have a partnership with Cisco. Most of our appliances in the environment are Cisco products, and we felt that going for a product from them would serve our data. We didn't look at other products.

This solution was deployed across different locations for different users. 
We have six remote locations, and we have two data centers. It's deployed across all of those locations.

I would encourage potential users to go for it.

On a scale from one to ten, I would give Cisco Umbrella an eight.

It is a good cloud-based solution for DNS security.

Its on-prem rollout is quite challenging. It needs better coordination with the Internet Service Provider. It is a cloud-based solution, and any endpoint that connects to it has to go through all the gateway ISPs, but some of the ISPs block HTTPS-based DNS. That's where the challenge occurs with Umbrella.

I have been using this solution for almost two years.

Its scalability is good.

I have not interacted with them because it is done through the vendor.

They need to engage the local service provider to do the technology improvements, such as for HTTPS-based DNS, which is a primary requirement for the customers.

I would rate it a seven out of ten.

We use Cisco Umbrella for monitoring and more.

I like that it integrates with the infrastructure. I also like the kind of data and intelligence that's built-in. It helps create innovative reports for security. 

It could be more secure. It would be better if they provided a transferring proxy as an add-on and more integration.

I have been dealing with Cisco Umbrella for two and a half years.

Cisco Umbrella is a stable solution.

Cisco Umbrella is very scalable at the cloud level. All you have to do is increase the internet bandwidth and pay for the license. 

Technical support is excellent.

The initial setup was pretty straightforward. It was simple. 

The price depends on the use case, and it's a bit linear. But it depends on the customer's strategy and how Cisco plans to optimize the costs. 

I would recommend this solution to potential users.

On a scale from one to ten, I would give Cisco Umbrella a ten.

We are using this solution for DNS filtering to try and make sure that users do not make ill-advised clicks and find themselves in harm's way. Once we started to implement it, we realized that just putting Cisco Umbrella appliances on the company's network was not good enough. The notebooks travel and the risk factor travels. We switched over and for some time now, we have deployed it predominantly on roaming clients.

In the current environment, it is a good thing we had deployed the Cisco Umbrella before people started to work from home because of COVID. The risk factors went up and the amount of thoughtfulness that people put into, "Is this a real message or is this phishing?" People became lax. If we did not have this solution, the number of clients that we would be dealing with attack issues would have mushroomed to a much higher level than we had to deal with. Umbrella has been a godsend for that.

The most valuable feature is the ability to block users from reaching places that they should not even try to reach has been a boon.

Once we were given a roaming client and we did not only have Umbrella servers filtering the traffic as it left the perimeter. They were giving us what we want and did not have to worry anymore, I was happy with the solution. I view it as a mature solution that delivers what we need.

One of the issues with Umbrella is as you get into endpoint detection and response, such as EDR point solutions, some of them will not integrate well with Umbrella. Sometimes when you want to use technology, such as Always On VPN, it will not work. There are some looming issues as one type of technology starts to crossover with Umbrella. That is the challenge and Umbrella should find a way to be more compatible with some of the endpoint response solutions that are coming out on the market.

I have been using this solution for a long time since it was OpenDNA which was before Cisco bought it.

There are no scalability problems with this solution. They do a good job of having updated servers around the world and at all hours of day.

One of the issues with Cisco technical support is that it is all linked to them having all of the maintenance contracts always running. If you work with a customer base where not everybody always renews their subscriptions and you need to get support but you did not sell the solution, it can make reaching the support a challenge. There is no problem with the quality of the support. However, sometimes Cisco's arcane rules regarding how they register and do tracking make it difficult for a managed service provider to get the support they need. 

We do not have a problem with getting support for Umbrella because we have a contract for that. It is trying to get support for all the various pieces of networking hardware that customers have not maintained properly difficult, Cisco is not easy to deal with in this regard. 

The initial setup is straightforward.

When talking about Cisco solutions in general there pricing model is horrible. For example, you can sell a Meraki-based solution, but if the customer starts shopping around, someone is going to have access to the pricing at a level that you cannot compete because they do not have uniform pricing. Not everybody gets fair pricing. Unless you are one of the real major corporations selling the solution your ability to compete is impossible. Cisco will acknowledge the situation and assure you next time it will be in your favor but it never becomes favorable for you. Cisco is not very good in this regard. However, Umbrella is good.

If you are not using some form of DNS filtering to guard against threats, you are not doing a good job on security in the current climate anymore. 

I rate Cisco Umbrella a nine out of ten.

We like Cisco Umbrella because of DNS security. It's one step ahead of whatever we are using for regular web filtering. In that way, it's more secure than other web filtering products.

The price could be better. The price is definitely a bit high, but we have to pay a premium for Cisco products. 

I have been using Cisco Umbrella for more than a year.

It's a stable product.

Cisco Umbrella is scalable.

Technical support is helpful and provides quick and fast resolutions.

The initial setup is very easy. Even the integrations are very easy.

Cisco Umbrella is expensive and could be cheaper.

I will recommend this product to other users.

On a scale from one to ten, I would give Cisco Umbrella a ten.