Cisco Umbrella Reviews

The solution is for filtering web content. We can control user access to applications as well as have visibility into Internet usage.

We are using it on approximately 300 servers. The solution is deployed across three departments. There are about 8,000 users.

Umbrella gives us control and visibility of our network using administration tools. This is helpful for us. 

The solution is very good for helping workers feel safe, secured, supported, and included.

Employees have accepted the solution. The solution is very good for them and their morale.

It has excellent resilience in cybersecurity. Cybersecurity for my organization is very important because we are a banking organization. We need this security to protect the personal information of our clients. This is very important for our security.

The most valuable feature is its web content filtering.

It is very important for our organization that the solution offers single-pane-of-glass management.

It is very easy to maintain network connectivity. 

The customer experience has been very good.

I feel that the application needs other characteristics that are available with other applications in the market.

I have been using it for three years.

It works very well across platforms with other providers.

It is very easy to scale.

I have never needed to use their technical support.

We have just used this solution.

Our initial setup was very easy.

We used an internal consultant.

Our leaders say that cybersecurity and resilience for our services is very important. They say technology is necessary for developing business with our clients. 

I would rate the solution as nine out of 10. The solution is very good, easy to implement, and manage. The visibility is very user-friendly. 

We have deployed an on-prem virtual appliance for Active Directory (AD) and user mapping. We have integrated our AD with it as well as all the pre-reqs that come with it.

It is a DNS solution. It stops us at the first layer of Layer 7, stopping at the DNS level. It just removes the burden for opening a connection, then looking at the firewalls and all the parameter devices. It has a single pane of glass that keeps you secure.

It has helped us in terms of the roaming client. That has helped us in terms of security. Whereas, previously the roaming client was bothering us, which got us into this solution. That has helped the end user with laptops and devices for different sites. This keeps us secure at all times wherever they go.

We are not using a DNS solution, but we have been using the firewalls and all the proxy firewalls instead, which has really helped us since we now know that the entire network environment is being secured by Umbrella. It gives us a real pat on the back that we are being backed by the Talos cloud and its security. We are monitoring in real-time. It works by itself to assess all the security features and parameters through Talos, which is really interesting and good for our environment.

The most valuable features are actually the reporting with all the visibility. It gives a hawk-eye view when we map AD with Umbrella. It gives us the visibility of every user, e.g., which sites and content are being used and who is accessing what. That has really been a good new addition for me.

We don't need to access multiple devices in order to give access to our internal resources. We are secured in having everything on a single pane of glass, which keeps us secure as well. We can enter the configuration to reach our destinations based on the main names. Other than that, it also secures us by not looking at only the destination, but also the predefined security parameters that Cisco Umbrella has provided. For example, if I coded command and control centers (CNCs), then most phishing websites, where there are known websites caught by Talos, are being categorized as the bad domain. That is where it gives us a nice, handy lift.

The single-pane-of-glass management is really important. In today's era, administration costs and operational expenses will cost you a lot, and it reduces that as well. You don't need extra resources to manage all your parameter firewalls, looking at every single device to allow resources internal access. By just introducing the single-pane-of-glass management, it has lifted the burden off of management, especially the network management.

It gives us a quick view into what we are looking at. We don't need to go to the different devices and see where our traffic is starving, etc. So, we have better visibility, when using Umbrella, from its single pane of glass.

We faced an issue regarding virtual appliances (VAs) during deployment. They could improve the quality and management of the virtual appliances offered right now. You can't see much because it is a Linux machine, and they have customized it. You don't have any route access to the machine, only seeing limited things in it. When we opened a ticket, they didn't know much about VAs themselves. So, that is where it is lacking right now. I know this will improve in the long run.

I have been using it for seven or eight months.

We used support when we were deploying the VAs. So, we have opened tickets a couple of times when we were stuck.

The technical support is alright. I would rate it as eight of 10. There was one time when I opened a ticket regarding the VAs, which didn't go quite well. However, it has been a good experience overall.

Positive

We did not previously use another DNS solution. This solution was our first.

It is very easy to maintain network connectivity. For medium- and large- enterprises, it is not going to take more than a week or so to deploy the solution. Or, you can deploy it with fewer complexities in a couple of hours. Therefore, it is not that hard to gel it into your existing network. So, it works like a charm for us.

In our environment, all traffic was going to the data center. It didn't take us much time, or the complexity of the network wasn't much, so it didn't bother us to pre-plan its migration. We just had to change all our DNSs on the perimeter firewalls and point them towards Umbrella, and that was it.

It has helped us to remediate threats more quickly.

It is pretty much handy in terms of what it offers. Actually, it is all about how it caters to your security. Every solution has their pros and cons, but Cisco Umbrella catches all the vulnerabilities and things that could hit any organization.

Previously, we were not tracking roaming clients, which were changing networks every time. I was wondering if something was hitting the endpoints, because we wouldn't know. When Cisco Umbrella joined our network, it explored all our networks. This was really interesting and a key part of why we chose it.

The end user isn't tech-savvy and doesn't care what is being done. As far as the system admin and network admins are concerned, their work has been reduced in terms of management and managing the entire network.

I would rate the solution as nine out of 10.

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.

We are using the Cisco Umbrella proxy product. Cisco Umbrella is part of our ongoing project for moving, more or less, to the full Cisco suite. We have Cisco ISE, DNAC, and SD-LAN. We are getting the new SD-WAN from Cisco. It's part of the whole portfolio we are getting from Cisco.

The integration features within, for example, the Cisco VPN product and the Umbrella module are valuable. The new features, mainly the security ones, are also valuable. It improves our security, and it's much more integrated and better than the one we have from Zscaler.

The main issue that we have is with the final steps or the full integration and getting rid of Zscaler. The company still has to fall back to Zscaler when something in Umbrella is not working as expected, such as when we enable SSL inspection. When something is not working 100%, the company is falling back to Zscaler. We have very good support, and I don't know whether this can be improved, but that is one thing to do for the final steps to get rid of the other product.

Its scalability could also be improved.

I've been using this solution for two years.

The stability of the solution is very good.

It could be improved mainly because the proxy is based on countries, and when you have no point to connect in a country, you can create issues. So, the spread around the world could be better.

We have 80,000 end users, and it's all over the globe.

Their TAC support is very good, but it always depends on people. So, there is no in-general there, but the people we are dealing with are very good. I'd rate them a nine out of ten.

Positive

For proxy services, we have been using Zscaler, and for SD-WAN, we have been using Nokia Nuage. For the SD-WAN solution, we made a switch because we had a lot of issues with Nokia Nuage. Don't use Nokia Nuage. It's pretty bad.

For proxy services, we are replacing the Zscaler solution with Umbrella proxy services, but I'm not sure about the reason. It's probably for more security features where using Cisco Umbrella helps us improve our security within. It's much better than the one we have from Zscaler for securing our infrastructure from end to end.

It was very complex because of a little bit of immaturity of the Cisco Umbrella solution in the beginning. All the features were not already enabled. In addition, we also had a moving target where we said, "We would like to have this, and we would like to have that," and when it was not there, we insisted to have it in. It was very difficult and challenging.

We are using BT. I would define our experience with them as big trouble. It's in the name.

On our side, we have three to five people, but it depends on following the sun. We probably have five people worldwide who are supporting this solution.

I'd advise looking into your needs and then comparing those with the features that are really valuable. It has been improved over the last two years, but just look at your needs and what the solution can really deliver.

I'd rate Cisco Umbrella an eight out of ten.

We started using the standard version of the Cisco Umbrella to upgrade to a newer version last year.

As a company with a global presence spanning over 110 countries, Cosentino requires a uniform security solution that can ensure the safety of its users. Our search for an ideal solution led us to seek one that was easily deployable, integrated seamlessly with our existing systems, and offered robust protection. After thorough market research, we found that Umbrella was the most suitable solution for our needs.

Cisco Umbrella has notably enhanced the perception of security among our users. The solution is seamless and transparent for them to use, and they feel protected at all times. This makes it an excellent solution for users in terms of their experience. Additionally, as mentioned earlier, the quick deployment time is critical for our organization, and Umbrella has significantly improved it.

Cisco Umbrella is an ideal product for our organization because it is a standardized solution that can be implemented uniformly across the entire organization. It adheres to industry standards and provides the same high level of security to all users, regardless of their location or role within the organization. This consistency in security measures ensures that every user in the organization is protected to the same degree.

Thanks to the standardized solution offered by Cisco Umbrella, our IT staff has been able to focus on other projects. Once deployed, we no longer have to worry about security in that particular area. The solution is easy to deploy and seamlessly integrated with our infrastructure, making our lives much easier in this regard. Overall, it has significantly reduced the burden on our IT staff and allowed them to focus on other critical projects.

Cisco Umbrella has enabled us to consolidate our various tools and applications by providing comprehensive security coverage for our users, whether they are working in our office or remotely from home. With Cisco Umbrella, we can address all our security needs related to browsing and network security. While it's not mandatory, we have eliminated the need for most physical firewalls worldwide by leveraging Cisco Umbrella's capabilities. This solution has proved to be a game-changer for us, as it simplifies the deployment process significantly, as previously discussed.

The primary advantage of Cisco Umbrella is its ability to safeguard our users no matter where they are working from - whether it's in the office or remotely, as per the new work model that has emerged globally. This integrated security solution has simplified our lives by combining all the necessary security measures in one product. Additionally, deploying the product is all it takes to protect all our users.

Although Cisco Umbrella has an excellent global network footprint, there is still room for improvement and growth in this area. Additionally, there are bandwidth limitations associated with the connectors that need to be addressed. To be a viable solution for larger offices, Cisco Umbrella must continue to expand and improve its capabilities in these areas.

I have used Cisco Umbrella for approximately four years.

Cisco Umbrella has generally been a stable solution for us, although we have encountered some issues with the new connectors. Currently, we are experiencing some minor problems with disconnections or other issues, but these occurrences have been infrequent.

While the solution is currently scalable, we recognize the need to continue expanding our connection points and bandwidth in order to accommodate future growth.

The support provided by Cisco Umbrella is excellent. In addition to the standard support included with the product, we have also opted for an additional support layer provided directly by Cisco. We have been extremely pleased with the level of service we have received thus far.

While there are areas where improvements could be made, such as the RMA process, overall we are satisfied with the level of service provided by Cisco Umbrella.

I rate the support from Cisco Umbrella an eight out of ten.

Positive

Deploying Cisco Umbrella proved to be a hassle-free experience for us. Since our SD-WAN is based on Cisco Meraki products, integrating Cisco Umbrella with Cisco Meraki was an effortless process. This integration has enabled us to implement the first SASE solution in our organization, and the combined solution of Cisco Umbrella and Cisco Meraki has helped us to set up new offices in less than 30 days, which is a significant improvement compared to the five to six months it used to take us earlier. This has led to a remarkable enhancement in our deployment speed, which is truly amazing.

Calculating the return on investment for a security solution is a challenging task, as it can be difficult to measure. While we have not performed a formal assessment of the return on our Umbrella implementation, I am confident that it has yielded a favorable outcome for our organization.

The licensing and pricing structure of Cisco Umbrella is in line with standard systems on the market, and we have no specific requirements in this area. Overall, we have found it to be an acceptable pricing model for our organization.

One of the main reasons we chose to implement Umbrella over its competitors was due to its extensive global network footprint, which closely matched our own footprint at Cosentino. Additionally, Umbrella's user-friendly interface was preferred by our users over other solutions, making it a more appealing option overall.

My advice to others would be to ensure that the Cisco Umbrella footprint aligns with the organization's needs. This is a crucial factor in ensuring that the product works well for the company.

I rate Cisco Umbrella a nine out of ten.

My main goal with Cisco Umbrella is to ensure protection for my users, regardless of their location. Additionally, the solution provides a positive user experience and is overall a great product.

Cisco Umbrella is a first line of defense. It protects the users from going to sites that should be avoided. Cisco Umbrella also protects against malware and phishing. It's a simple and very effective product that works seamlessly in the background. It doesn't disturb you in any way unless you access a website you shouldn't. Then, it will interfere with it and stop you from going there.

It would be good if the more complex versions of Umbrella are simplified so that we can offer them in a more standardized way. We, as a telco, do not operate the same as a traditional integration partner would, who can sell all its services. We try to have a standardized approach as much as we can so that we can sell the solution with as many services added to it as possible. If you look at the structure of businesses in Switzerland, 95% of them have 10 persons or less, and they do not have a security specialist. Therefore, the higher the automated and standardized features, the better it is for them.

We've been offering Umbrella for three to four years.

I've been working with Cisco's products for several years now. We in the B2B area of Sunrise work with Cisco kind of exclusively, it's really our main partner. I look after security products and Umbrella. The cloud-based security products around Umbrella have been the focus of my work.

As a reseller, the value we bring to our customers is the fact that instead of just selling them connectivity or access to the internet, we offer them a base level of security with it. I think that is highly valued by customers since security is typically a topic they struggle to deal with.

When it comes to the stability or performance of Umbrella, we have been very pleased. When you add security on top of unsecured transport, you may have certain delays, but our technical colleagues consider them to be not too bad. Stability has never come up in a customer context as an issue.

When we look at the scalability of Umbrella, we can see the great advantage of it being a cloud-based service. Therefore, scalability is not an issue on our side. We can assume that it will always be around and that the performance will always be good.

I've had very few interactions with Cisco support, and the ones I've had have been good. I'd give Cisco's technical support a rating of nine out of ten.

Positive

We sold a different solution previously, which provided a much simpler DNS protection. It did not have the power and is not really comparable to Umbrella. It was more of a consumer-level product that did not have much of an impact. I had it installed on my internet access at home, and it never intercepted anything I did. It's only once I installed Umbrella that I saw differences in the ways my DNS calls were intercepted. The main reason why we offer Umbrella is its business-grade security.

One of the great advantages of Umbrella DNS is that it's really simple to deploy. It's easy to install, the users do not notice that it's there, and it doesn't interfere with your work. The simplicity and transparency are great advantages of Cisco Umbrella. Cisco could take Umbrella DNS as a good example and also improve on other products.

Cisco solutions are generally perceived to be rather expensive. We have constant internal discussions as to whether we should offer lower-priced security solutions from some of the competitors.

If you are looking for the first time at Umbrella, you should really understand what is behind the solution. Behind Umbrella is Cisco Talos, a research team within Cisco, which is one of the largest private ones in the world. All the input out of the activities of Talos goes into Umbrella and makes it a really valuable product.

As a service provider, we know that other service providers are using Cisco Umbrella, and that was a big factor for us in choosing it as well. Also, we had seen large telcos like TIM in Italy using it for many years and being satisfied with it.

Customers are always worried that somebody in their organization will click on something he or she should not click on. Umbrella does a good job of protecting a business from ruin in worst-case scenarios. It works in the background and is like an airbag.

I would rate Umbrella Easy Protect, which is the simplest on the Umbrella DNS side, at nine out of ten. Because Umbrella SIG is still under development and is very promising, I'd give it an eight out of ten.

Our partnership with Cisco is overall good. It has its ups and downs. Cisco is not always an easy beast to work with. Sometimes you see that traditionally they have a very strong enterprise focus, but we as a service provider have a different need than enterprises, and that sometimes has its challenges.

We were looking to solve multiple challenges, from DLP all the way through to regular content filtering offsite for our hybrid and remote employees.

Using Cisco Umbrella has brought us into compliance with our customers on a number of points.

Also, it's very important that the solution helps support hybrid work. That was one of the main reasons we got it. About 45 to 50 percent of our employees are either fully remote or hybrid. We needed a solution that would follow them home.

In addition, it's very helpful for securing infrastructure from end to end and detecting threats. It's blocking a lot of stuff, so we don't even have to remediate. It's blocking things before they get to us.

Resilience in cyber security is very helpful and this product has increased our security posture quite a bit.

The most valuable features for us include

• Tenant lock
• Content filtering 
• DLP solutions, looking for PII and information being exfiltrated.

Also, the policies are applied wherever you go, and that's good.

There are a couple of different pieces that have different portals. I know they're working on getting them all into one portal, but that's probably the biggest thing that needs improvement right now. It's not a single pane of glass yet.

I've been using Cisco Umbrella for about a year.

We haven't had any issues with the stability of the product.

The scalability is very good and that's another one of the reasons that we chose this product. You can slowly ramp up the policies. You don't have to build it all at once. We started small and have been deploying more and more of the features of the full SIG Essentials package that we have. We can add more users when need be. It scales on a policy and a user and a deployment basis.

We have about 400 end-users and five sites. We use the AnyConnect module on the local workstations.

The solution's technical support has been very good. I haven't had to call them very much, but the technical support has been good when I have needed it.

Neutral

Previously, our users were only in-house and we had internal firewalls that were doing a lot of this work. But now that they're hybrid, we had to come up with a new solution.

We evaluated Prisma because we have Palo Alto firewalls, but it was more expensive and more difficult to set up.

I don't think our workers like it all that much. It has actually made employee morale worse because we block a lot of stuff. But that's not really the product's fault. It's our policy. It makes things a little bit more cumbersome for them, but it definitely makes us feel safer.

I would tell leaders who want to build more resilience within their workplaces to do it. It's important because one hack and your business is done. Your reputation is everything in this day and age. Being resilient and being able to recover from that type of stuff before you're actually exfiltrated is a big deal.

Overall, Cisco Umbrella is pretty easy to use, pretty easy to deploy, and it does what we want it to do.

We use it for DNS filtration across all data centers, offices, and remote users.

The blocking of all the non-malicious traffic from DNS request queries has been huge. DNS is very important from a security perspective. Securing this layer, specifically for the remote users and the remote workforce that we're seeing today, is definitely a big gap that needed to be filled.

The DNS Umbrella agent is already installed on the core machine. So from day one, when our CEO sent all employees to work remotely, all we had to do was flip a switch to have a DNS filter on all core machines.

The visibility that Umbrella gives us into what a user is doing, versus what we want to block, is huge. It's not that we're policing things. It's just a matter of watching and having visibility. We're definitely not going to block every domain, but having visibility is very big.

It enables us to go granular in the customization of blocking some categories on the DNS. 

Also managing all the DNS aspects from one portal is definitely great from a security perspective. Sometimes we get a malicious URL in a phishing campaign on the email side. Blocking a domain across the whole company in one minute is definitely great. To block a DNS request very quickly you just add the domain to the Global Block List and in one second it's blocked.

Another feature that is good in Umbrella is applying and maintaining network connectivity consistently across all workplaces. You can go through the categories and do templates based on the sites, such as a data center or a branch and apply policies based on that.

Having ready-to-go templates with best practices is definitely something that would be an improvement. Deployment, from day one, is something that definitely needs to be improved for Cisco customers.

I have been using Cisco Umbrella for four years.

The stability is a 10 out of 10.

The scalability is also a 10 out of 10. We use it across all the company's offices and data centers. We have 1,500 users.

The Umbrella service itself is great. Sometimes, with technical support, we go through "tag" problems, but otherwise, it's pretty smooth.

Neutral

We did not have a previous solution. We used to use CWS, which was Umbrella before it was named Umbrella.

The ROI is visible in the portal through the executive reports. They show how many times we block malicious sites. Management definitely gets a view of the fact that we're blocking a lot of malicious domains with Umbrella.

We have a security Enterprise Agreement with Cisco, so the pricing is good. We take many security products in one agreement, so we have no complaints about the price.

From a DNS perspective, Cisco Umbrella is the number-one technology now.