Cisco Umbrella Reviews

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.

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. 

Protection and security provided by using Umbrella are the two top areas that I looked at when considering. With three campuses, Umbrella has proven itself with the detection and blocking of malware, viruses, and preventing users from visiting malicious sites. We have two Umbrella virtual appliances at each campus, with two campuses using Hyper-V, and the primary data center running VMware. 

The reports have given us insight into what the Internet is being used for at all three campuses. They provide insight into internet usage and information helpful in creating QoS rules.

• My favorite feature is the command and control callback blocking. It provides protection from crypto attacks by blocking the connection back to the attacker's server giving an added layer of defense. 
• Policies make the work easier by providing appropriate filters for locations. 
• The interface is simple, easy to navigate and set up.

If the virtual appliances could also gather traffic bandwidth reports, that would be great. 

The customer support is exceptional. 

They have a wealth of articles in their knowledge base. This has given me the freedom to troubleshoot on my own time. 

Cisco Umbrella's interface is easy to use and the visibility of user activity is extremely useful. 

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.

The customers that we provide this solution to are small businesses that have 10 to 25 employees.

Employees working from home normally don't have security, so through the cloud we can manage the devices, the endpoints, a mobile or notebook, etc. We can provide more security for these devices when the employee is not working on VPN, for example.

I think recently with many people working from home, Cisco Umbrella has been very useful. For example, we can manage the device and the network when the employee is not working on the local host. Cisco Umbrella is very valuable for this kind of infrastructure.

I think it's a very basic solution, and because of that, we provide it to the small business market. Cisco Umbrella would not be a suitable solution for large companies.

In the next release, integration or shoulder, for example, to a firewall on-premises using Cisco Umbrella to connect would be good. If possible, it would be good to take the weight off the shoulder of the solutions.

I've been working with Cisco Umbrella for around one year.

Our customers have not had any problems with stability.

The scalability of Cisco Umbrella is very good.

When we had problems, technical support was 100% helpful, so I think it is very good.

The initial setup is very simple. We usually have one engineer per customer for deployment and maintenance.

I would recommend this solution to small businesses. Compared to the next-generation firewall, I think Cisco Umbrella is more basic than other solutions.

I would rate it at nine on a scale from one to ten.

We act as an MSP for our organization, and we use this solution as part of the service. We are the parent company and we acquire insurance agencies. Typically, these agencies have between twenty and one hundred and twenty people. We do not force them to move onto our system; However, we show them what value they will receive by us taking on their network infrastructure. This includes the firewall, switches, IP phones, email platforms, etc. 

This solution allows us to manage our four hundred locations under the same umbrella, with the same configurations. It makes it easier to troubleshoot and provide the same solution to everyone.

The most valuable feature of this solution is its reliability.

Security, overall, can always be improved.

The stability is good, and we have had very few problems with the equipment. The problems that we've had have been with our carriers. I can, pretty much, put a solution in place and not even worry about it.

My impression is that this solution is very scalable. It allows us to grow. We can add fifty sites per year, easily, and not really have to redesign from the ground up.

When we need technical support, they're usually very responsive. I usually get a solution or an answer between thirty minutes and a couple of days, depending on what the technology is, and whether the issue is critical or not.

The smaller sites typically use non-enterprise grade equipment, and we switched because it is easier to manage the solution, especially when it's set up to our standards.

The initial setup can vary in complexity depending on the size of the agency, as well as other factors including what they already have in place.

We do all of our integrations in-house.

We have most definitely seen ROI. In most cases, when we take over, we're always saving on monthly costs. The turnaround investment is usually under a year.

There is a one-time cost of approximately $800 USD per user, and then a yearly support fee of about $50 per user. Our fees end up being about $150,000 USD per year.

We have one vendor, and interoperability is not an issue when we use Cisco.

This solution had been pretty good and it fits our needs. If we have business needs change then we will look at whether the current solution can do it. If not then we have to reach out and find something else.

My advice to anybody who is researching this type of solution is to do their homework when it comes to comparing products. Compare apples to apples, and ensure feature parity. I would stress that the support organization behind the product is very important. For us, any of the other products that we've used just haven't performed up to the standards of what we are doing.

I would rate this solution a ten out of ten.

I do not know what the latest version is that is currently installed, but it is cloud-based monitoring so it is one of the most recent versions.  

The primary use case is for endpoint users who are not working on our office premises. They are remote employees who are roaming so they are not within our protected zone. They can be vulnerabilities if they are browsing content and there is malware included on those web sites. Umbrella allows this kind of monitoring on remote devices and we can block those sites. We can also block applications which we would like not to allow to be running in the organization.  

With Umbrella our primary use is that we can monitor the endpoints for external devices. We will protect the users from malware phishing through email and the websites they are browsing. Umbrella is a solution for things like DNS (Domain Name System) protection, filtering, and security.  

I think the one feature we are using that Umbrella provides that is the most valuable feature is the DNS security. It is used to watch all the traffic which we are routing through the endpoint and organization firewalls. The users and devices are diverted by our secure gateway which scans each and every DNS request. It notifies us if it is not safe and allows those that are. It is like an alarm center application near our firewall.  

In the way we are using the solution it would be good for us if they would do some simplification of the analytics. They need to improve this feature so they have analytics to show the content of the user activity. I would like there to be some more analytics provided so that we can see the application routing and additional specific information. Those kinds of analytics can prove to be helpful in our security efforts. For me, this is the only thing that could be improved in Cisco Umbrella. They already have so many features that it is hard to imagine what else they can add.  

I have been using Cisco Umbrella for two years.  

Ever since we started using this product last year, it has been stable. If any service is down, we can see on the dashboard whether all of the resources are online or not. If something is down because we are working on it for some reason, something could happen then. But in two years, I did not find any issues due to the product becoming unstable on its own.  

Right now, we are working as a startup and we have 13 members of the team who are using the Cisco Umbrella. They are using it directly during business hours with configurations and analysis and other maintenance and access. It is the product's job to watch all the traffic routing to data points throughout the nine hours as it is routed to pass through the Cisco Umbrella.  

But whenever other users are trying to access the network — even in the non-business hours — if they are using their office laptop, all the traffic will be routed through DNS security. Umbrella is protection for the company devices from websites that may do something like data attacks on remote laptops. It handles all of these requests no matter how many concurrent users we have.  

We will be adding DNS to all the endpoints. For this, we will update the Cisco Umbrella DNS software for all our data points to watch all the traffic that is going through the EndPoints. It seems it will be very scalable.  

I have not contacted the technical support, but I had a discussion with the sales and diagnostic people. The technical issues are mostly something I resolve on my own by looking at the documentation. But once, when I wanted to implement some tool for a new solution, I contacted the sales team and they asked me some questions about what exactly it was that I wanted to accomplish. After I answered the questions in the meeting with them, we came up with the solution and the process and put it to work. So the sales team knows the product well.  

Previously, in another organization, we used OpenDNS. That product was purchased by Cisco to be used as their product under the name of Umbrella. So I did not switch the product really, but the name and my company have changed.   

The initial setup is a simple process. If you build on-premises, the deployment will take half-an-hour. If you build on the cloud it is like 10 minutes. it could be even less than 10 minutes. It is really fast. It will take five minutes to sync to the endpoint, to the cloud, and to collect the data. The syncing is what takes the time.  

I have gone through the documents for Cisco Umbrella. So I have been deploying the product myself without the help of a technician and we are doing the implementation on our own.  

The only maintenance we do is we need to update the latest version through our version management software. We just update the agents on the endpoints.  

Because it is a cloud product, Cisco uses subscription models for the pricing. There are three subscription plans for Umbrella. They have a standard plan and also an enterprise plan and another one. The different plans cover different features and options for different sized organizations. It gives you the option to compare the subscription plans and get the coverage that you need.  

My only real advice to people considering Umbrella is that I can recommend this solution. On a scale from one to ten where one is the worst and ten is the best, I can rate Cisco Umbrella as a nine-out-of-ten.  

We use Cisco Umbrella to block student access to pornographic and non-education websites. I also use the solution to block access and restrict student permission to download from malicious websites.

Cisco Umbrella is easy to monitor, manage, and deploy.

The solution is very expensive in Brazil.

I have been using Cisco Umbrella for five to six years.

The solution’s initial setup is easy.

We have different profiles for students and tutors for internet access. Students cannot access applications like Instagram and WhatsApp, but tutors are permitted to access these applications. We use Cisco Umbrella for access security, and I don't use another layer of security.

Overall, I rate the solution a nine out of ten.