Cisco Umbrella Reviews

In a previous organization at HBL, we were using Cisco Umbrella as well, so it has been a quite long time.

Cisco Umbrella is specifically designed for DNS protection, with features including a user-friendly console and the easiest installation. It offers very prominent threat feeding from different Talos sources, securing multiple platforms. Cisco Umbrella helps protect from malware and unsafe sites. It is especially useful in mitigating DNS attacks and ensuring secure browsing for end users.

The major issue is that sometimes when you install the client, it shows you protected and displays that it is live with the backend servers and everything. However, in reality, it was not getting any feed from the main client and is just sending your traffic to open DNS, which sometimes causes an issue because the protection you have implemented can be breached by users.

The primary thing that Cisco Umbrella lacked most of the time is their client. Previously, they had a separate Cisco client. Now they have merged everything into the Cisco Secure Endpoint client—one client for everything, for Cisco Endpoint, for Cisco AnyConnect, and for Cisco Umbrella, which they did probably in 2025.

I have been using this solution for almost two years.

As a customer, I have never been satisfied with any product for a longer period of time, so that is a tricky question to answer.

If you require 10 clients or however many you need or whatever expansion you require, they are just a click away.

Cisco is always known for their best technical support, so there is no doubt about it.

At that time I was working in HBL on the Symantec DLP product.

Cisco Umbrella is specifically designed for DNS protection, and the features they have include a user-friendly console and probably the easiest installation.

If you go with the main competitor product, there is no doubt that Infoblox is the best product.

There are a couple of products we are working on. We use Cisco EDR and XDR, for DLP we have Forcepoint, and for cyber threat intelligence, we have EPP.

We focus on DLP and the classification tool, which is for data visibility and DLP. It is kind of data protection that is used for classification.

For Cisco, we use FTDs. It is the Cisco Secure Endpoint, which is known as Cisco EDR, Endpoint Detection and Response.

We use Cisco Umbrella for DNS protection. In the current environment, cyber security resolves your addresses securely and protects from threats from outside. Most attacks happen over DNS, so those DNS queries can be mitigated if you have a secure way for browsing for your end users.

We are not using Cisco Umbrella for the proxy. We are using it from our DNS perspective. As a strategy, we are using it for outside communication through the DNS resolver. However, Cisco Umbrella has now combined with Secure Access, which comes with different features. Previously, Cisco had WSA for the proxy. Now they have come up with a proxy solution that gives Cisco Umbrella protection with remote proxy and cloud proxy solution, which is known as Secure Access.

As I mentioned earlier, they have very prominent threat feeding from different Talos sources, securing us on multiple platforms where, as an enterprise, you might not have those features and the feed to protect yourself. Cisco Umbrella is definitely a good product from that perspective and is going to help you protect from malware and from sites which are reputedly not marked as safe for the user. I would rate this review an eight out of ten.

Public Cloud

My use cases for Cisco Umbrella in my company are basically to allow and block URLs, to block websites, mostly external websites, and to allow or block accordingly.

The feature I appreciate most about Cisco Umbrella is the dashboard and how easy it is to see the reporting, what is blocked and allowed, and it makes it very user-friendly. The dashboard and the reporting functionality are standout features. Cisco Umbrella has improved my company as it makes it very easy to allow or deny any URL, websites, and internal communication, and it is very easy for the administrator to use.

I am unsure how Cisco Umbrella can be enhanced, but sometimes there are some lags, and I have to refresh multiple times to access parts of the dashboards. Sometimes the dashboard pages crash and I'm not sure why, so that's one area for improvement. However, this doesn't happen frequently.

I have been using Cisco Umbrella for two years personally, and enterprise-wise, it has been in use for approximately four to five years.

Cisco Umbrella is stable and reliable. Sometimes, for whatever reason, some features on the dashboard crash, and I have to refresh, but I wouldn't say it's significantly hurting the functionality. It's just something to improve.

Cisco Umbrella is very scalable. We use it with multiple customers, and my customers use that solution. It's very scalable, and I've heard from other teams within my company that it's been used at least with a few teams.

My experience with customer service and technical support for Cisco Umbrella has been minimal, which indicates that's a good thing. If I don't need to go to support all the time, that means the product is working fine, so I'm very happy with them.

Positive

I did not use another solution in my company before choosing Cisco Umbrella that does the same things.

From my point of view, the biggest return on investment when using the solution is that it makes it a lot easier to delegate some of the tasks that were traditionally used, such as building policies on the firewalls and doing it through Cisco Umbrella. This aspect cuts a lot of time, resulting in significant time savings.

I have not utilized the experienced insights feature of Cisco Secure Access. I am not sure how Cisco Talos Threat Intelligence influences my company's ability to act against emerging threats. As an administrator, I see there's a threat and I'm not going to allow those websites for my internal users to access unless they specify why they need to go to that website.

Cisco Secure Access is doing its intended purposes. If I don't hear a lot of complaints, it's probably doing something good. It's one of the products that I have the least issues or complaints with, which is why I don't interact much with support. I haven't used the Secure Internet Gateway feature of Cisco Umbrella and cannot assess it.

I would rate Cisco Umbrella a nine overall from one to ten.

Public Cloud

My main use case for Cisco Umbrella is to protect DNS queries that are going outside to the internet. When I open Cisco Umbrella, the first thing I do is watch the dashboard to analyze what the traffic looks like in the last 24 hours, how many malicious queries have been blocked, what the valid usages are, and how many blacklisted URLs have hits.

The scope of monitoring Cisco Umbrella involves two or three people or some people in the SOC team doing the monitoring. Cisco Umbrella is used company-wide.

From my experience using Cisco Umbrella, one of the best features is that it provides protection for the endpoints even while off the network, which means that if you are working from home, your DNS queries are protected well enough, with the caveat that it only protects DNS queries but does not work well when accessing something via IP address.

Cisco Umbrella has definitely helped improve some aspects of our security posture, contributing to overall organizational security posture management. I have seen improvements in that it cut down on malicious traffic; if there is a new domain registered by a malicious actor or hacker, it is quickly detected by Cisco Umbrella. For instance, there was a phishing link we discovered, and we blocked it in Cisco Umbrella, ensuring anyone trying to access that domain would be blocked, which is a critical feature even when off the network.

The biggest frustration I have encountered with Cisco Umbrella is that people can exit the Cisco Umbrella roaming client to bypass security, and some technically savvy individuals might know how to bypass it by modifying the hosts file to exclude Cisco Umbrella.

If I could change one thing about Cisco Umbrella, it would be to include traffic for DNS resolution even on IP addresses for extra protection and to enhance the analysis capabilities, considering the advancements in AI.

During implementation, there were not really any features that we are not using today, but SSL inspection was something we never enabled due to requiring extensive approval and legality considerations.

I have been familiar with Cisco Umbrella for almost one year.

Before adopting Cisco Umbrella, we did not have any tool and only used the firewall as a prevention tool, mostly relying on next-generation antivirus focused on behavioral analytics.

In terms of implementation, Cisco Umbrella is more of a SaaS tool, and configuring in the SaaS tool on the cloud is simple and quick; however, to protect the endpoints, deploying the clients on the endpoints is time-consuming. Configuring policies and downloading the client is easy, perhaps a one or two day task, but deploying the clients to all the endpoints definitely takes more time.

When evaluating options, I was not involved in the POC of Cisco Umbrella; I was a part of the engineering team that deployed it.

My team did need a small interaction with team members to explain the use cases implemented in Cisco Umbrella, which was important, and the knowledge base articles available on the Cisco website were good and useful to have handy.

My advice for someone considering Cisco Umbrella, based on my experience over the past year, is to understand your clear business requirements, check all the required features, and note that Cisco Umbrella provides good DNS security, though there are other competitive tools, such as Zscaler, which address the challenges I noticed in Cisco Umbrella. Based on your requirements and budget, analyze the tool during the POC and finalize your choice. I would rate my overall experience with Cisco Umbrella as a seven out of ten.

Public Cloud

Other

Securing the remote worker is their predominant use case, as clients are using it for securing the remote worker to securely access both internet and private applications, and DNS security is part of that.

The most beneficial feature is that Cisco Umbrella has moved to something called Secure Access, which is a full-fledged SASE solution. It is a cloud-delivered service where you can have firewall as a service, CASB, and there are multiple options and solution sets for this. The best possible thing is that it is very easy to deploy, easy to configure, and very fast to get onboarded with a customer because this is a cloud-based service.

Cisco has Talos threat intelligence feeds, which come free with any of the Cisco security products. If the customer has Cisco security products, they get Talos threat intelligence feeds free of cost, and through these feeds and AI-driven updates, the organization is protected as they receive information on the latest threats updated on a daily basis.

If you are experienced enough, then it is simple to install, but if you don't have much experience, then it may become a little difficult. That is why we deploy it in our COE first and then go and deploy it at a customer location, but overall it is not that complex.

I have been selling Cisco Umbrella for two to three years now.

Cisco Umbrella Secure Access is pretty stable in my mind, and we have not seen many glitches that would have interrupted services at customer locations.

It is a scalable product. You can scale up as your users grow and buy more licenses quite seamlessly.

Cisco is pretty good, and I would rate their support as good.

Positive

It is a value for money product for sure. However, it does not have that kind of awareness plus brand within the customer, as they are influenced more by brands such as Palo Alto or Fortinet. Cisco is a big brand in the networking domain, but in security, they are pushing a lot and improving day by day, though still, Palo Alto or Fortinet are more sought after.

Typically it is the Cisco solution we sell most, which is the NAC solution called ISE, so from a NAC solution perspective, most of the customer locations we have sold Cisco solutions.

We sell Cisco Secure Access, we sell their endpoint solutions, and we sell XDR, so we are a big partner to Cisco as well.

Cisco security products are quite competitive, but it depends upon the time of the day. If you ask them at a quarter end, you get pretty attractive pricing.

I have heard about AI features in Cisco Umbrella, but I will have to possibly study a little bit more about it. Nothing comes to the top of my mind at the moment, but I can provide further insights later.

The integration capability is pretty good. It is very good and comparable to other peer groups.

I would rate my overall experience as a reseller with Cisco Umbrella as a seven to eight.

Public Cloud

Other

We use Cisco Umbrella to detect malicious URLs, DNS queries, data exfiltration, and DNS tunneling. It is particularly effective in showing DNS queries and providing visibility for external DNS queries, especially in communications to malicious sites from internal systems.

The DNS data exfiltration and the blocking of DNS tunneling are the most effective features for threat prevention in our company. The DNS layer security provided by Cisco Umbrella is very effective for our security posture, offering us vast improvements in visibility over DNS queries and potential threats.

We need to work on integration as it is very complex. Making it more flexible and easy to deploy, particularly when integrating with other technologies like Active Directory and proxies, would be beneficial.

I have been working with Cisco Umbrella for the last three months.

Cisco Umbrella is stable, and I would rate its stability at nine out of ten.

Cisco Umbrella is scalable for our company. I would rate it nine. We are in the POC stage with twenty users, and once we purchase and deploy it, the number of users may increase.

I am satisfied with Cisco support. I would rate customer support ten out of ten due to the excellent assistance throughout the POC process.

Positive

The initial setup was complex, requiring two months for deployment due to the challenging integration process.

Currently, we have not been provided with the financial terms. We are evaluating our internal environment before proceeding with an RFP for a quotation.

The main concern with solutions is financial. Whichever solution gives us a good financial deal, we will consider it. All solutions have similar features yet vary slightly in deployment and workflows.

I recommend using Cisco Umbrella at full capacity with all features. My overall rating for Cisco Umbrella is ten out of ten.

Our primary use case for Cisco Umbrella is to provide DNS layer security, secure web gateway, and cloud access security broker functionality. We also utilize its integration with other security solutions, policy management, and mobile device support. Customers use Cisco Umbrella for these features to enhance their cybersecurity measures.

Cisco Umbrella offers DNS layer security, a secure web gateway, and cloud access security broker functionality. It provides threat protection by blocking threats before they reach the user's device. The firewall and integration capability with other security solutions are valuable for effective security management. Customers choose Cisco Umbrella for its DNS layer security, policy management, and mobile device support.

Cisco Umbrella can be improved in terms of limited coverage and wind vulnerability. The product can only shield a small area, making it less effective for larger spaces or multiple users. 

Additionally, strong winds can disrupt its functionality, and the opening and closing mechanism can be awkward in tight spaces.

We have been working with Cisco Umbrella for two years. My technical team has been handling the Cisco portfolio for the last fifteen years.

I have not experienced any major stability issues with Cisco Umbrella. Occasionally, troubleshooting and firmware upgrades are required, however, overall, the solution is stable.

I rate the scalability of Cisco Umbrella as seven out of ten. It is a scalable solution but requires improvement in specific areas.

The customer and technical support for Cisco Umbrella are very good. Cisco's support is fantastic, providing assistance when needed, especially during the initial installation process.

Positive

The initial setup of Cisco Umbrella is not very complex. Certified resources trained for two to three days can easily implement the solution. On a scale from one to ten, I would rate the setup experience as a six.

Our customers have seen a return on investment since implementing Cisco Umbrella. It effectively enhances security and meets customer requirements.

The pricing for Cisco Umbrella is average. The only cost associated is the license cost unless additional solutions need to be integrated with Umbrella, which would incur extra costs.

We also evaluated Infoblox for DNS, as Cisco does not offer DDI (DNS, DHCP, and IP address management) capabilities. Infoblox offers a more comprehensive solution for these functions.

I would recommend Cisco Umbrella for its overall functionalities but not specifically for DNS purposes. For a complete security management solution, Infoblox is a better option for DNS management. 

Overall, I rate Cisco Umbrella six out of ten.

Hybrid Cloud

Other

I have implemented Cisco Umbrella for one of our customers. I did an installation of two virtual appliances onsite, on-premises, and all the DNS redirection is done to the Umbrella cloud. The customer uses it primarily in the office for their DNS queries to the Internet and also internally, as the virtual appliances redirect to the internal DNS servers.

The most valuable aspect is that it is hosted with Cisco and can detect any new anomalies, acting almost like an XDR. It provides zero-day protection by detecting any new suspicious DNS queries. Another key aspect is its DNS layer security, which helps in creating scheduled reports and allows access to these reports through the Umbrella dashboard. I can export the reports to PDF, CSV, or Excel files, and even generate reports as needed. Furthermore, Cisco Umbrella has improved the security of my customer's organization because all DNS queries pass through the platform. They are able to see reports and get ratings of different sites their users try to access. If a machine is attempting to access compromised sites, it can pinpoint the machine to prevent it, thus narrowing down the attack surface.

The channel of support needs improvement. It is not under normal Cisco support, and I cannot simply call for support. Instead, I have to write an email to Umbrella support to get assistance, unlike the other products where I can call the Cisco technical assistance center and get an engineer.

I have not faced any challenges with Cisco Umbrella. As long as DNS is pointed to Umbrella, everything runs as expected.

The scalability is good. I have no complaints.

Getting a response takes a while, so I would rate the support a seven. The support channel isn't like the usual Cisco support where I could call instantly for a hardware issue like a router or switch. Umbrella requires me to write an email.

Neutral

The only problem with Cisco Umbrella is the support. The product itself has good performance, a user-friendly interface, and excellent scalability. I rate Cisco Umbrella a nine out of ten.

On-premises

The primary use case for Cisco Umbrella is DNS security.

The most valuable feature of Cisco Umbrella is its DNS security. It is beneficial for end-users, particularly mobile users, as they benefit from the enhanced security posture provided. The solution helps in improving the security posture mainly because mobile users benefit from security.

I do not interact with the product on a daily basis, so I will not be able to provide detailed insights into potential improvements. However, the prices need to go lower. The price of technology is just crazy.

I have been working with Cisco Umbrella for more than five years, at least five years.

I will give stability a score of seven out of ten, as there are some glitches from time to time. 

I would give the scalability a score of seven. It seems adequate for our needs.

Technical support from Cisco is okay. I do not have a problem with it. However, sometimes, it takes a while to get a response, and the team can be very rigid.

Positive

The setup process was simple and not too complex or complicated.

The prices need to be lower as the current pricing is exceedingly high.

The main competitor for Cisco Umbrella on the market is Netskope Security Cloud Gateway. I prefer Netskope Security. Its security capabilities are more favorable to me.

Overall, I rate Cisco Umbrella an eight out of ten. 

While my use case is primarily for mobile users, the entire enterprise can benefit, whether they are mobile users or not. The benefit is across the board.

Hybrid Cloud

Other