Cisco Umbrella Reviews

I'm a principal consultant for one of the energy sector companies, which basically extracts oil and gas and also deals with solar energy. We are dealing with anything related to energy. It's a supply chain as well.

We have been using Cisco Umbrella for more than one year. Basically, after the COVID situation, when the hybrid model came, we needed to give work-from-home options to the employees and look into cybersecurity. We had to get some cloud security. That is why we have introduced Cisco Umbrella.

We chose Cisco Umbrella because it's a better option industry-wide. It can inspect all the web traffic from anywhere. When traffic is generated from any local internet, it might be anything. It doesn't qualify for cyber security for any company. That's why you have to have something to inspect all the traffic. Cisco is a good vendor for us. That's why we chose Cisco Umbrella.

By using Cisco Umbrella, you are sure of inspecting all the traffic. Whenever the user machine is connected to your network, it is inspected. That's the best thing. It means you are sure that nothing is being exported or imported without your choice. That is the best feature.

It generates alerts, and you can integrate it with your ticketing tool. When it's integrated, it can also generate a ticket. That means you know when something is wrong or what's going on. It has helped a lot during this hybrid model, and I don't think that this hybrid model is going anywhere. So, you can simply say that Cisco Umbrella is a good tool for the future as well.

It hasn't freed up our IT staff for other projects because no one thought about this work-from-home model before COVID. There were many alerts after Cisco Umbrella was installed, which means many staff members were invested, but its automation, such as automatically generating alerts and automatically assigning tickets to a queue, has helped a lot. We don't need to do any physical or manual inspection. It's being done automatically, which is a good point, but it hasn't decreased any resource hours.

It's the best tool to inspect everything. We can inspect all the user traffic generated from anything.

If you wish to inspect all the traffic and it's integrated with Cisco AnyConnect, all the traffic basically goes through Cisco AnyConnect, which is not a good idea. That means you need to have more internet capacity as a data sampler, so in the case of a split tunnel, we cannot inspect the traffic that is being migrated through the local internet. I'm not sure whether there is a possibility wherein Cisco Umbrella can also inspect the traffic that is outside the AnyConnect tunnel.

We have been using Cisco Umbrella for more than one year.

We're using Cisco Firepower to replace the ASAs as perimeter firewalls to the university's network. We're predominantly using Cisco Umbrella for web filtering of staff and student web traffic that is generated from the university campuses.

Cisco solutions are simple, efficient, and effective. We're definitely seeing that our users are protected by using these solutions. We're using Cisco Umbrella to protect around 1,500 staff and about 15,000 to 16,000 students. At any one time, on our campus, we could have 3,000 student endpoints protected and about 1,500 members of staff with laptops who are working hybrid since COVID. So, they're protected when they're on campus and when they're off campus. As a university in Edinburgh with three main campuses, we have two internet connections where firewalls protect us from bad stuff on the internet.

Cisco solutions have invariably saved us time. Without them, we would've had ransomware attacks and cyber attacks. So, they have helped protect us as much as they can. I don't have the metrics, but it's a university, so we're probably quite often under attack.

Our operating expenditures (OpEx) haven't really reduced. With moving to subscription-based, our OpEx has probably gone up rather than our CapEx coming down. 

The insight into what our users are doing via Cisco Umbrella is valuable. Knowing that we're protecting our users as they leave our network is also valuable now because we've got more hybrid working. With Cisco Umbrella and Cisco Secure clients on all our hybrid working laptops, we know that our staff is secure even when they're working from home.

They should provide more integrations and bring things together so that there is a more standard feel to their platform. We also use Cisco ISE, and it has a very different feel from Cisco Umbrella. We also have some Meraki products which feel very different from others. It's like you have to learn something new with every product you buy.

We've had Cisco ASAs, but we're just in the process of replacing them with Firepower, so Firepower is quite new. We've been using Cisco Umbrella since 2020.

We have a good Cisco partner called Ping Network Solutions in Scotland, so anytime we need to reach out for a bit of advice, we can ask them. We had good pre-sale support with Cisco as well to ensure that we get the right products that match our requirements. I'd rate their customer service a nine out of ten.

Positive

Instead of Cisco Umbrella, we used Zscaler for web filtering, but we've always had Cisco firewalls.

When we switched in 2020, Zscaler didn't seem to be developing their product as well. It didn't match our requirements anymore.

I was involved in its deployment although I had a technical team working underneath me. It was easier than Zscaler because Zscaler made us have two instances, one for staff and one for students. It was very complicated, and we had to route traffic in different ways. Being able to do it by DNS with Cisco Umbrella was just easy.

I managed the team that was deploying it. My role involved making decisions about what traffic and which groups of users we put through first, some early field tests, and things like that.

We did it all by ourselves.

We have seen an ROI. With Zscaler, we had more operational issues than we've had with Cisco Umbrella.

You get what you pay for.

We use Cisco Firepower, and we use Cisco Umbrella. Currently, these two products are not very integrated. We don't have the complete suite of Cisco solutions. We just have two that aren't joined. We also work with other technology partners, such as Microsoft, but in terms of the perimeter of our network, it has always been a solid product like the Cisco firewall.

I'd rate Cisco Umbrella a nine out of ten.

The most valuable features are the dashboard, visibility, and reporting capabilities. Our customers can see how much Umbrella is protecting their organization. If you don't know what you've got, you can't protect it. With Umbrella, we get visibility and see the protection that it's providing. We can get PDF reports on a weekly basis of any malware activities and any denial of service or command-and-control-type activities.

Cisco Umbrella is very simple to administer, and that's what our customers really like. They don't want the complexity that's normally associated with security.

Cisco Umbrella definitely reduced our clients' mean time to repair. It does what it says it does, and it does it effectively.

Cisco Talos is the secret sauce. It's the threat intelligence that feeds security solutions such as Cisco Umbrella. You can have a security solution, but if it is not backed by an organization like Talos and has not been fed, watered, and looked after, then it will be pointless.

Our clients have been able to consolidate applications and tools related to DLP, CASB, web proxy, and SSL decryption. These are natively built into the Umbrella platform. We're now on the cusp of looking at SASE and, maybe, migrating away from the traditional on-premises firewalls and merging more toward the cloud. In the future, as we start the transition to zero-trust network architecture as well as SASE it will certainly help our customers consolidate a lot of their existing tools.

The firewall capabilities could be better. Cisco is starting to introduce some layer 7 capabilities now, but there's still some room to grow. They should continue with the development of Umbrella so that it is a full-blown cloud-managed firewall solution.

We've been using and selling Cisco solutions since Cisco acquired OpenDNS.

We like to use technology first ourselves. It makes it easier to talk about it and sell it. Also, it's a good reference for customers to see that we actually use it internally. Umbrella has been a fantastic solution for us and our customers.

The initial deployment could take a couple of days depending on the deployment model. Cisco Umbrella could be up and running quickly. You can instantly point your DNS servers to use Umbrella's DNS as its recursive DNS, and immediately, you'll be protected by Umbrella. You can take it further and get more granular controls by using AD integration, which can take a little bit longer. From an engineering point of view, it's a very light touch, which is unusual for security solutions. They're normally pretty complex. Cisco Umbrella, however, is a simple but powerful solution.

Given that it's a cloud-delivered platform, Cisco takes care of the upgrades. It requires a pretty light touch in terms of maintenance.

I think Cisco Umbrella is priced well. We have a mix of customers with different verticals such as education. We have clients in the commercial space as well. Umbrella is at a good price point for all of our customers.

We choose to sell Cisco because it has done phenomenally well in terms of some of its acquisitions and the way they've integrated Umbrella. It could be a flagship security solution for Cisco. It's been a game-changer for us and has opened up new avenues and new revenue streams as well.

As a Cisco Secure reseller, we're able to articulate the benefits of the solution to the customer because we are a technically-led organization. We've got a lot of in-house skills within the cybersecurity space. We don't sell for the sake of selling. We want to provide the right solution, and Umbrella is absolutely the right solution as far as we're concerned. It is the leader, especially from a DNS level protection.

Cisco Umbrella is a phenomenal security solution. It's got the right balance between complexity and ease of use. Therefore, I would rate it at nine out of ten.

As a Cisco partner, try to test things on our own before we position the product to our customers or educate partners on it. So, the primary use case was to test things out and to be our own first customer. We started using it internally for our own purposes to secure our access to the internet with Umbrella.

We use Cisco Umbrella to secure internet connectivity and especially to focus on the threats introduced through web browsing. This is because most of the applications the workers use are browser-based.

The traffic, by default, is typically encrypted with HPS, and we use Cisco Umbrella to get more insight into that traffic. The classical security appliances have very low visibility into them. This is where we see Cisco Umbrella have the most traction.

In general, it increases the security level. It helps us prevent threats from being accessed. Also, the visibility into internet bounce traffic is increased. So, in general, it increases the overall internet security of the organization.

One valuable feature is definitely its simplicity in terms of deployment. It is very easy to integrate it into the environment without any heavy lifting. Users didn't notice that we implemented it. You can start with a very low monitoring mode and start observing what Cisco Umbrella sees.

In terms of helping workers feel safe, secure, supported, and included, the solution is pretty transparent to the end user in most cases. They don't necessarily get any confidence from it, but it's supposed to be that way. It's supposed to be as transparent as possible. However, when the end-user accesses a site that is blacklisted or treated as potentially suspicious, he or she will see a warning displayed. This gives them additional confidence that somebody else is taking care of the details and that they can confidently browse around. If they come across a suspicious site, they know that they will get a warning or advice on how to proceed.

Cisco Umbrella supporting hybrid work environments is important. Within our organization, even before COVID, a lot of us worked remotely from time to time. For companies that we work with, it has become a reality with COVID. Before, everybody was working on site, and now, that's no longer the case. It is important to have flexibility and know that even if we work from home or from another place we're still secure.

For all Umbrella-related things, it does provide single-pane-of-glass management, but it's one component. If I look at the typical employee, he is only one piece of the puzzle. Other solutions, like, for example, AnyConnect for remote access, are managed separately. For Umbrella-specific items, it's a single interface for management. For monitoring, policies, and troubleshooting a specific case, everything is in one place. I don't need to go through the logs to know where to look.

My organization is not very large, and I'd say my colleagues are pretty proficient. So, it's not a high priority to have single-pane-of-glass management, but it's always good if solutions are capable of integrating together. If by enabling single-pane-of-glass management the workflow is simplified and the day-to-day operations are a little easier, then that's something we definitely want to benefit from.

The administrator user experience is definitely optimized by single-pane-of-glass management, especially if the personnel are busy. Then, it helps if all the relevant details are in one place.

In terms of maintaining network connectivity, Umbrella on its own is pretty user-friendly. It is easy to set up and maintain. It's one of its strong suits.

For the branch and campus, it's very simple to apply and maintain network connectivity. For the home environments, there are options to integrate it into the employee's PC as well. Cisco Umbrella supports different methods for different environments so that you can achieve the level of implementation that you need. It's where it should be.

It's very efficient in securing the infrastructure from end to end so that we can detect and remediate threats. You can simply adopt it right into the environment, and you don't need to build the rule sets on your own. It utilizes best practices, and it's very easy to set up policies such as potential malicious categories on the internet, what you want to block, what you want to filter out, etc. It's very easy to implement those.

When you go through the reports, you can see what kind of threats were blocked. Luckily, we haven't had an incident where something got through and caused a security incident.

In terms of metrics on how Cisco Umbrella has been able to remediate threats, the numbers look pretty impressive. However, it's hard to assess how serious that potential threat really was. It's hard to put actual weight on the numbers to determine how meaningful those numbers are.

The value that resilience helps offer in cyber security is pretty high. Cyber security resilience is a high priority in our organization. It's important to our customers that we handle what we do for them in a secure manner.

I'd like to see this solution more closely integrate with other products Cisco has in its portfolio.

I would also like to be able to manage the identities, for example. If you define them in ISE, it would be good to be able to use the same identities also within Umbrella. It would simplify the use of multiple products within the organization from the same vendor.

I've been using it for about three years now.

Stability-wise, Cisco Umbrella is pretty robust. The uptime statistics are very high. There are, generally, no issues with stability.

Our organization isn't very large, but it's pretty scalable for larger organizations. At the moment, it's not a limiting factor.

Technical support is one of Cisco's strong suits. In my experience, the Umbrella team has been very quick to turn around requests. It's even been above average by Cisco's standard compared to the turnaround time for other Cisco solutions and products.

I would give Cisco's support a rating of nine on a scale from one to ten.

Positive

We deployed it by configuring local devices to redirect the DNS request to the SAS service Umbrella provides.

The solution is cloud-based. You just send your DNS request or your traffic to it. You can start with a monitoring-only mode. So for example, you can redirect the DNS request and start observing what Umbrella recognizes. Later, you can start defining the policies, setting up the enforcements, etc. You can very quickly get to the first results.

Actual ROI numbers are really hard to measure and determine. Generally, we see that customers who implement Cisco Umbrella and start using it tend to renew their licenses. They adopt the product, and they recognize the value it brings. I think this shows that there was a return of investment for them and that it achieved the desired level.

Licensing with Cisco can be a little complex, but I think it's comparable with that of other similar products. It's always hard to put a price on security, but the price is fair for the value it provides.

We're a Cisco partner, and we work with a lot of Cisco solutions. So, it was pretty easy for us to decide what we wanted to try and test. We didn't really do competitive selection and assessment, and it was pretty straightforward for us to go with Umbrella.

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

Our primary use case for Cisco Umbrella is for content filtering and for different access lists. We have different lists for different departments of what they can access.

It makes it really easy to accomplish content filtering. We don't have to do a lot of customization. You just click the box for the content category and it's up to date. 

This ability is very important to my organization because we're in the financial sector and security is at a premium. 

Cisco Umbrella is pretty straightforward and simple to use. We recently did social media blocking and it was really easy for our marketing department to access it. It's pretty straightforward. 

It helped free up IT staff for other projects. It saves us a lot of time by blocking potential breaches. It's very reliable.

Umbrella has definitely helped us improve our cybersecurity resilience by blocking malicious links and adware.

I would like for them to continue building on IPS and IDS functionalities. 

We have been using Cisco Umbrella for five years. 

It's been very reliable. I haven't had any issues with it. 

The scalability is easy. It's deployed through group policies. 

We're a Cisco shop. We have a lot of their products.

We have seen ROI through its pop-up blocking. 

We hope that Cisco will help us consolidate tools more than it is now by incorporating more IPS and IDS functionality. 

My advice to someone considering Cisco Umbrella would be to focus on how easy is to use the GUI and how easy it is to navigate. You pretty much just click a box and the content categories work. 

I would rate Cisco Umbrella a ten out of ten. 

If your needs vary by department, I would advise making different groups for different departments. It's easier to do it that way than to set it up and go back to tie it to different AV groups. 

Cisco Umbrella improves web security posture.

Meraki features and cloud-based functionality are advanced and easy to manage centrally.

Reporting is a separate product. However, other features are embedded within the devices themselves. So, if you have one box, everything is included, which is good.

A more user-friendly interface like Kaspersky and lower costs including licensing, support, and renewals would be beneficial.

My company has been using it since 2005. 

It is a stable product. 

It is a scalable product.

The customer service and support are excellent, exceeding expectations.

Positive

I used Sophos, FortiGate, and Palo Alto firewalls.

Cisco Umbrella is manageable and well-supported by various vendors and partners, including Cisco Direct. It offers diverse technologies and features. However, now Sophos and FortiGate offer better tools and firewalls than Cisco.

Forti excels in SD-WAN services and integrates various functionalities like FortiManager, FortiAnalyzer, and Wi-Fi controller within a single device.

It is easy to implement. It is not straightforward, but it is easy. It is easier than before. 

The licensing cost is very high. We have to pay for support, renewal, and maintenance. FortiNet is cheaper compared to Cisco Umbrella. 

Consider your budget. If you can afford it, Cisco Umbrella is a stable and scalable solution.

It's a strong Cisco product.

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

We use Umbrella to front-end all of our DNS requests and that way they protect any of our end-users from going to any kind of malicious site. It doesn't matter if they're in-house in one of our locations, or if they're remote and working from home. That was the biggest part was the fact that we could protect our end-users, even when they're not in the office.

We were actually trying to solve other challenges, which included just to protect the onsite, but once COVID hit, it pretty much made it a very easy transition for us. At one point, when COVID was at its highest peak, we had everyone working remotely. We didn't have to worry about how we were going to restrict our access on the internet, because Umbrella was already handling that for us.

It made us more secure, which is a very important thing for a financial institution.

The support for hybrid work was the biggest thing. It protects our users, whether they're in the office or they're out of the office. We get the same policy in both locations. We can assign policies based on individual group memberships and it travels with them no matter where they go. It helps no matter where they are.

Since it's based on user DNS requests, it's right from the endpoint all the way through the network to be able to identify those locations and restrict access if necessary. It's not just the malware sites, which is very important, but it's also just content in general. There are business reasons for restricting access to certain content.

Since we implemented Umbrella, we are seeing a fairly significant amount of threats being blocked. A good 20 percent of all the activity, on average, that we see is actually being blocked by Umbrella, because it's either violating policy or it's some kind of malware.

Both monitoring the activity, so that we can investigate anything that may pop up, and the ability to restrict the access, or filter out what content end-users can view or go to [are valuable features of Umbrella]. Also, the fact that it blocks them from any known malicious locations.

It works really well and the best part about it is the fact that it's transparent to the users until they try to go somewhere that's either restricted because of content or restricted because of the fact that it's malicious. Then they simply get a popup and that's all there is to it. So from their perspective, it's very easy. They don't have to do anything in order for it to work.

There is a single portal that we go to that handles being able to set up policy, look at activity, or even manually add sites that we think that we want to restrict, even if it's not considered a particular category or a particular malware. The single-pane-of-glass management is very important. We have a very small team. We can't spend a lot of time going from product to product to product to either investigate or set up policy. We need to have one place that we can go to and set everything up.

It's really easy. It's an easy portal to go to, it's cloud-based, so we can get to it from anywhere. The ability to set up the policy is pretty straightforward. There are a lot of tie-ins with other products, like SecureX and other things, that make it just as easy.

It's cloud-based, so as long as you can get to the cloud, you're golden.

The only thing I can think of is that I'd like to see a little more flexibility in policy creation. The way that policy is currently structured is like a "first hit succeeds" kind of policy. It would be nice if it were more hierarchical.

I have been using Cisco Umbrella for about four years now.

It's been extremely stable. In the last four years, I do not recall a single outage. There has been nothing that I can think of that actually affected the performance of the system at all in the last four years.

We've never had an issue with scale. We've scaled it up to every user that we have in-house. When we deployed the gateways, we deployed two for HA purposes, but from a scale perspective, it's DNS queries. It doesn't take much. Our whole organization is on it.

Support for Umbrella is very good. There's a way to contact them directly from within the portal and we use that periodically.

I give them about a nine out of 10. There are issues with Cisco's tech support, like all the rest of them.

Positive

Umbrella was actually the first [solution we used in this area]. Once we discovered that that was a big hole we had—we didn't have anything that was controlling content for our internal end-users—we could run into problems with regulation, problems with compliance. It could run into issues with HR, as well as security issues associated with malware. We knew it was a hole, that we were missing. Umbrella filled that hole for us.

There were two pieces of the deployment. One was the cloud deployment, which got us set up in the cloud to begin with. We also had gateways that were installed on-prem, in-house.

We were able to get the gateways up and running in about an hour. The cloud deployment was all done by the Umbrella organization on the back-end side. To deploy to the end users, all we needed to do is set up a policy that said, "This is what you use for DNS." Once that was set up, we were done. Deploying that was done in a group policy and that group policy was pushed in a matter of minutes. The entire solution was probably deployed in just a few hours.

We did it all ourselves. Cisco handled the back-end side with the portal itself, but the rest of it, we did ourselves.

I think we got our return on investment within the first month of its use, because of the increased security that we had in the organization; the ability to have a product that is protecting our end-users. We do educate our end users today, but Umbrella doesn't require us to go through as in-depth an education process to say, "Okay, you're going to have to do the research. You're going to have to figure out what sites are bad. You're going to have to figure out where not to go." We don't have to do any of that. That's all handled by Umbrella. We just need to let them know that we're protecting them on the back-end side.

Its value exceeds its pricing.

We looked around to see what was available. There were a lot of content filtering solutions available, but one of the things that Umbrella brings, in addition to content filtering, is that awareness of known threat sites. Their tie-in with Talos, Talos being that organization that does all that research and feeds that into Umbrella, means that we not only have known malware sites from six months ago, but we're getting feeds from Talos within hours.

The impact on our employees' morale has been good. Anytime the employees understand that we're doing something from a technology standpoint to secure the organization more, that makes them happy. It's something that they don't have to concern themselves with as much and it improves morale quite a bit.

Resilience in cyber security is extremely important. We're a financial institution, so cyber security is very high on our organizational goals, all the time. Making sure that cyber security is resilient against any of the latest attacks that are coming out is extremely important. It's a constant thing. Cyber attacks are increasing every single year. The methods that are being used are increasing every single year. If something were to happen, not only would we have a financial impact, but we have a reputational impact. For a financial institution, a reputational impact could be just as devastating as a financial one.

Umbrella helps us with that overall security. It gives one less attack vector for the bad guys to get into. We're protecting those end-user devices and we're protecting those end-users from going to places that could be malicious. The fact that it's doing that for those end-users increases our overall security without us having to rely specifically on end-user education in that particular attack vector.

For leaders who are looking to increase resilience within their organizations, I would say that what is necessary is to do as much security, in-depth, as you can. That includes using Umbrella to protect your users and using lots of other security products and being able to secure every aspect of your organization.

I would rate Umbrella absolutely a 10 out of 10. It's literally a lifesaver when it comes to being able to protect our endpoints.

We're actually in the process of using this to replace our current web proxies. We use both, side-by-side, at the moment. The plan in the future is to eventually get those replaced with Umbrella so that we can have an overall, overarching proxy either that's based in the cloud or whatever we need. But this currently is our most convenient way of replacing web proxies across all of our locations at our company.

It's definitely made things more centralized. Our current setup is that we have proxies, either physical or virtual, throughout our different locations. Each location has its own proxy at the moment. What's nice about Umbrella is that we can just go into the site and see all of our locations in one place and look at all of our computers, users—everything. It's not divided into separate proxies that we have to go into and figure out which person's using which proxy. Umbrella lets us just see everybody at once, which is really handy for us, and we don't have to spend too much time messing around with figuring out who's where and which location needs this change. [We can just make] changes throughout every location at once, rather than one at a time with those proxies that we currently use.

The past couple of years, [the fact that the solution helps support hybrid work has been] especially important because now we can't use those proxies if people aren't onsite. The way our network was set up was that we had it filtering through the firewall and the firewall was taking certain subnets and filtering those through the proxy. But obviously, when people work from home, we had to get a VPN connection set up. Before COVID, we did not have a work-from-home solution at the time, so everybody had to be in the office. Obviously, that all changed very quickly and Umbrella became a much bigger priority for us because that was our main replacement for those proxies at the time.

We had to expedite the process of setting it up, but what was nice about Umbrella was that it was so user-friendly, it was so easy to set up on our end, that it didn't take as much time as we thought it would. It just simplified the entire process throughout the couple of years that we have especially needed it. But what's cool about that is that now, it's a permanent part of our network. Thanks to the last couple of years, we use it all the time now. It wasn't just a temporary solution for hybrid work because now we use it for both. We have the ability to do hybrid work, but we also have the ability to use it for our employees onsite as well.

[When it comes to threat remediation] most of it is automatic so we don't really have to worry about it too much. Umbrella will just block something if it detects it as malware. That is a super convenient feature for us, that we don't have to manually review every single site. If we do have to review a site, it's nice to have that investigative tool. We put in the URL and it gives us a risk score, depending on how dangerous that site might be. That's super helpful for us to analyze that site, take a look at it, and make a decision on whether we need to block it, or if it can be unblocked. Every situation is different, but Umbrella makes that summary page very convenient for us. It allows us to make decisions much faster and more efficiently.

Our cyber team is a bit different from our network team. We have a separate team for that, but it's nice because they also use Umbrella for a lot of that, depending on what the site is. We use the investigative tool for the risk score, but it also comes with a few other tools, and part of that is just so that they can assess what's safe and what's not safe and what might be detected as malware. Obviously, they have other tools for that as well, so Umbrella is just one cog in the big system. But it definitely allows for easier communication between our teams because we both use it and we can both understand it. It's user-friendly enough so that we can make decisions with them based on what Umbrella tells us and how we interpret that information depending on the site, the situation, the risk score, everything.

We have a lot of employees, a few tens of thousands. We get probably hundreds [of threats blocked] every day. I wouldn't be able to give an exact number on how many are blocked. The main ones we look at are the ones that people request us to specifically look at because they might not think that something was supposed to be blocked, or something is not working properly, and we can go in and investigate that. But there are probably hundreds to thousands of blocks per day on the sites, across all of our locations. That automation allows us to relax a little bit easier and know that our network is much safer with Umbrella on it than it is off. The automatic side of it is basically saving our jobs. That really helps, and we're able to look at anything. Overall, as a program, it has saved us a ton of time and stress by not having to worry about malware or viruses or anything malicious.

One of the coolest features, for me at least, is to be able to type in a website and have it  give an overall summary of how safe that website appears. Part of that is just so that we can investigate. And if there's any sort of confusion between our cyber team and us, we can look further into that site and dive more into that risk score that Umbrella gives us. We can just analyze [those sites] and make sure that we're unblocking safe sites and blocking sites that we deem could be harmful for our employees.

I would say it provides single-pane-of-glass management. We still, of course, use those old WSAs, but in the long run, our plan is to get those replaced with Umbrella. We have locations in Japan, Korea, China. So it's a little bit more difficult to go through one proxy for all of those, especially because it's a bit slower. What's nice is, [with] Umbrella being in the cloud, we can just go into the site, see everything from the management console in that page. Nothing is slow [and] nothing is hosted by us so that we don't have to worry about network issues or management issues. Everything is just laid out right in front of us from the Umbrella dashboard on the internet, in the cloud. And that makes it super helpful for us to just manage all that from one spot across all of our locations across the world.

We aren't a very big team, so that's the main thing. Going through filtering web traffic or blocking sites or unblocking sites, whatever we need to do, can be a bit tedious, especially when we have all these different locations and we would have to go into each location specifically to perform these tasks. Umbrella, being one pane for managing, being all-encompassing, allows us to quickly go in, make a change, and it applies to either every location, if we want it to, or we can have policies in place that only apply to certain users or certain computers. And that makes it super useful for us because we're not messing around with jumping into all these different locations and manually doing each and every one individually. It is extremely helpful for us and it improves efficiency exponentially.

I have personally been using Cisco Umbrella for almost a couple of years. Our company implemented it about five or six years ago. Most of that time was spent getting it set up, but we've really been using it more within the last two or three years now, so it's still pretty new to us at the moment.

[In terms of maintaining network connectivity] obviously it depends on the situation. With Umbrella, it's a bit easier, for sure. There are times where Umbrella, on their side, is having an issue and we're notified of that issue. But in that case, there isn't really much on our side that we can do. To that extent though, the pros outweigh the cons. It's pretty rare that Umbrella is having a problem. The way that our network is set up is that we can reroute traffic pretty quickly using our other Cisco devices, so it's not usually a big issue for us. We have fewer problems with Umbrella than we do with our physical WSA proxies that we currently use, because that is something that we would have to troubleshoot on our end, and we're not always there on site to be able to do that. Then we have to go through someone else who's over there and they have to console us in and we have to troubleshoot whatever's going on over there.

With Umbrella, it's nice to have them tell us what's going on so that we're aware of the situation. If there are any problems, then we'd know what the issue was and how we could work around it. That makes it a bit simpler for us.

Network connectivity isn't really a huge issue for us with Umbrella, specifically. Our use case mainly is just for blocking internet traffic, making groups. We have social media groups where we allow certain computers in places to have access to certain social media sites that we wouldn't normally do. We have other sites being blocked, depending on their use case. That's mainly our function with Umbrella. Internet connectivity is usually not a huge issue regarding Umbrella with us, but if it ever is, it's nice that they communicate the issue to us, [so] that we can work around it.

In my experience with Umbrella support, sometimes the response times take a bit more time than we would like. Obviously, it depends on how they're contacted. But usually, when I contact them via phone, their support team is great. They help me out with everything. But sometimes, if you go through email, it can take quite a while to get a response. Obviously, if it's through email, the issue's probably not as pressing as it would be through a phone call, but the response times could be a little bit better. Email, I usually just avoid. I usually just call them now.

They're super helpful. In terms of response times, it could be a little bit better. Some issues are more urgent than others, but if it's an urgent issue, obviously we just call. Sometimes it takes a little bit [of time] for them to get back. I would probably rate them a seven out of ten.

Neutral

We've had to deploy connectors across certain locations, but [in] all the locations we have a domain controller and that needs to be deployed on those domain controllers throughout all of our different places. I've done a couple of deployments. Most of it was already deployed just by the time I got here. 

[In] my experience of how deployment went, it was very easily laid out, very simple. The instructions were super clear. I didn't have any issues with that. As more of a newcomer to the entire industry, this has been much easier than I expected it to be. Umbrella, as a product, is very simply laid out, very user-friendly. I couldn't praise it enough for helping me out with my job. 

While the support [can] sometimes take a while, overall they're super helpful, they make it very easy and they make you feel like you're not doing anything wrong. They're super friendly and make everything super easy for you. Umbrella as a product, overall, is very user-friendly, as a newcomer to my company.

The plan is to replace those physical proxies that we have. In terms of return on investment, getting rid of those across each location [has been valuable]. In terms of the efficiency with time, it's definitely saved us a lot of time and money troubleshooting different issues and securing the network and helping people access what they need to access. Just in terms of time and efficiency, it definitely has a return on investment.

Trying to replace those physical ones as well, getting rid of those, just having this be the all-encompassing way of filtering traffic and unblocking, of making policies, it definitely saves us a lot of time with the solution that's offered.

In terms of [our employees] feeling supported, they have the ability to submit a request to us very easily. When they get blocked from a site, it's not just one page saying you're not allowed here. They have the ability to submit a request to us so that we can look further into that site. That makes our employees feel more included in the process of helping the company access the sites that it needs to use, [as does our] communicating with those employees [about] why a site might be blocked; or a site that needs to be blocked based on what they find and what they're doing for their job. The important thing is that they're able to talk to us in case there's a site that they think that they need to access and helps them feel included in the entire process.

Like I mentioned earlier, it's one cog in the big system that we have out of our solutions for cybersecurity. We also use products like AMP, we have certain firewalls that also block certain things, the way they're configured. But overall, Umbrella, if we're talking about users on the internet, using sites or accessing different websites, is a big help in determining what exactly they need. We can go into Umbrella and help them understand why something might be blocked, or if they need to get into something, we can make certain policies within Umbrella. It's obviously just one tool out of the many that we have, so these configurations are pretty involved and even I don't know how they all work. It's divided amongst our team. For cybersecurity in general, it's great. It simplifies it. It's very useful in terms of the automation and how it blocks everything, and how all that stuff is interconnected. I would say that it is a lifesaver for us.

As somebody who is pretty familiar with networks and just learning everything, but being an inexperienced network manager, I would say that it makes the entire process very painless, very super simple to understand. In my experience, it's a nine out of ten.