Cisco Umbrella Reviews

Custom whitelist/blacklist/block page allows us as consultants to tune web content filtering for the SMB market.

OpenDNS supplements other security solutions to allow for blocking through DNS requests, which is common for malware to use to bypass other security mechanisms.

This product needs policy scheduling for enforcement by category. Notice in all the packages, there’s no scheduling. In the Insights or Platform package offerings, you can now essentially have multiple ‘policies’ per AD user or network group. What’s missing is that I still can’t set enforcement to block certain website use at this time of day or these days of the week. For instance, a company may allow streaming audio sites for music only for night shift workers to help them keep awake and versus dayshift workers.

I have been using the web-based, small-teams edition since 2007 (nine years).

We have never encountered issues with general deployment.

We would rate customer service and tech support after the Cisco acquisition a 5 out of 10.

We’ve used and deployed ZScaler, Websense, and other UTM-based blocking solutions. This product is not always the best if you need complex policy and scheduling, and other user soft-pass through authentication.

Initial OpenDNS setup is straightforward if you have a static IP address and you apply the DNS forwarders appropriately. This is literally a five-minute-or-less change.

We always implement for ourselves and for others in-house because of ease of use. Implementation-wise, companies should be aware that changing DNS forwarders might impact their global DNS operational needs. OpenDNS servers are also slower than something like Google DNS.

Pricing needs to be reduced for SMB based on the blocking capabilities and the lack of other features that you just cannot do in DNS, such as authentication-based filtering.

Also, scalability-wise, the pricing is more of a challenge for enterprise-class environments because of the pricing model.

OpenDNS is either a good complement to your existing web content filtering solution at the enterprise level, or it is a good free or easy-to-deploy alternative for home and SMB use.

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.

Our primary use case is for protecting and defending against cyber-based threats. So anything on the internet emanating through DNS-type attacks and then also content filtering. It ensures that our employees are only going to know safe categories. 

The weekly reportings are great. The investigation is super and the application management is equally great.

The reporting could be improved by way of the information that's displayed. For example, when you pull a report, it shows an internal employee going to many websites, but you can spin that right down by saying a lot of it is being cached. So for example, if you go to www.msn.com, that would then not only pull the MSN domain down, but it would also bring back all the ads and the adverts. It looks like you've been to 30, 40 websites when in actual fact you've only been to one. They should narrow it down.

We have had Cisco Umbrella at my company for three years but I have been using it for six months. 

The stability is great. 

We've got full coverage, but from an admin perspective, there are four users who use it on a daily basis. 

We've contacted their support once or twice and thy were great.

It is 1,000 on a yearly basis. Everything is included in the standard license, there are no additional fees. 

It does not require maintenance. It is very light in that way. 

Architecturally, for the deployment, you should consider if you want it on roaming clients or if you want it central. If people are connecting back through a VPN, it's then probably on every single client. Looking at how we're all working now with COVID, having a roaming client deployment gives you that added layer of protection because you're not dependent on the users connecting back to corporate VPN. They're always protected. Think about your deployment.

I would rate it an eight out of ten. 

To replace my original DNS servers and configure more than 50,000 computers through domain name resolution.

It has helped reduce my unit's security events. It possesses a visual graphics table, which enables me to understand the resolution of the blacklisted domain. Sometimes, I can understand which URL is visited most often by reviewing the user's resolution.

• Black list
• Visual graphics table

These can reduce security events and can find out which users have security issues.

• Its DNS service does not support IPv6 query.
  
• Some countries don't have a DNS server leading to a domain resolution IP, not at a local level.

The price could be lower.

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 use it to provide cloud-based security services for our customers.

We've found it to be stable and good for our customers.

It's a very new product, so it's quite immature at the moment. It can be more user friendly.

We took it in our company a couple of months ago.

It is stable.

It is very scalable. We've got it for very big customers. We probably have several thousand users.

I have not personally interacted with them because we have staff that does that on our behalf.

We switched because we just wanted to be in the Cisco ecosystem, not specifically because other products from other companies were not good enough.

I wasn't involved in that.

There is a subscription cost.

I would recommend this solution to others. We plan to keep using this solution.

I would rate Cisco Umbrella a seven out of ten.

Our customers used an older version of Cisco, but we proposed Cisco Umbrella for their POC phase.

The user interface is great. It's very easy to tailor to our client's environment and needs.

There should be some programs for the POC phase.

I would like to see more integration between Cisco Umbrella and Cisco DNA center

I have been using Cisco Umbrella for one and a half years.

Cisco Umbrella is very stable.

The support is very good.

The price of Cisco Umbrella is a little higher than similar solutions; however, I am not exactly sure what the price difference is.

We compared Cisco Umbrella to other solutions including Zscaler and Palo Alto.

Integration is better with Cisco. Cisco Umbrella performed very well compared to Zscaler and other solutions.

On a scale from one to ten, I would give this solution a rating of nine.

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.