Cisco Umbrella Reviews

Cisco is a very efficient and on-point solution that controls the whole network and settings on one page. We can monitor the entire network.

The solution could be faster as the process is very slow.

I have been using Cisco Umbrella as a reseller for four to five years.

I rate the solution’s stability an eight and a half out of ten.

We have deployed it to small businesses.

I rate the solution’s scalability an eight out of ten.

The initial setup is straightforward and takes few hours to complete.

I rate the initial setup a nine out of ten, where one is difficult, and ten is easy.

ROI is pretty good. I rate it as eight out of ten.

You need to buy an additional license for customer services. The licensing is moderate.

I recommend the solution.

Overall, I rate the solution as eight and a half out of 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. 

Our primary use case was to first replace the solution we had since it wasn't able to give us security outside our premises. Also in terms of configuration, we had to have extra configurations in our Active Directory to identify the users and the equipment. Cisco Umbrella gave us a chance to do it in a more clean way, without having extra software working on our domain controllers.

Cisco Umbrella is deployed as a cloud solution with an on-premises server so that it can make the connection through our Active Directory to identify the equipment.

The most value we've seen after using it for a month is the ability to identify more clearly the usage of any device.

With Cisco Umbrella I am able to manage DNS resolutions on our devices both when they are inside and outside our network, supporting a hybrid work environment.

Umbrella has helped my IT staff in two ways. First, our security team was able to get more insights into the users, their devices, and the sites they browse. Second, our system administration team was able to manage DNS resolutions in a way that is more accessible and less intrusive to our domain system.

Soon, our IT staff will be able to save time because we'll be able to automate some security functions. The dashboard is very clean and user-friendly. Thus, at a glance, we will be able to see a lot of information that will help us identify more directly the sources and the root causes of security issues.

It's easier for us to have support features with companies who are Cisco representatives, but sometimes, it's hard for us to get the help we need without having to use our contacts within Cisco.

We've been using Cisco Umbrella for nearly a month.

We have not had any issues with stability, but we've only had the solution for one month.

The few times when we had to contact Cisco's technical support directly, we had perfect interactions with them. Therefore, I would give technical support a rating of ten out of ten.

Positive

We were using another solution for DNS security. It was not as complete and  would only allow us to manage security inside our network. We weren't able to get to the endpoints when staff were not working on-premises. We did a proof of concept with Cisco Umbrella and two other solutions for three months and chose to go with Cisco Umbrella because it gave us the features that were more suited to our organization.

In our environment, it was straightforward and simple to implement Umbrella. We had SCCM for the end devices for mass deployment. Our domain controllers were connected to the server. The initial parameterization only took us three days. Currently, we are in the most difficult part of fine-tuning the solution so we can take full advantage of its features.

Our Cisco partner helped us with the implementation.

Pricing and licensing of Cisco Umbrella is a bit confusing because you have to separate the DNS solution and the full-feature solution. Cisco in Portugal helped us understand which one was the right one for us.

Since Cisco Umbrella has given me better performance and extra features that I didn't have previously, I would give it the maximum rating of ten out of ten.

We are a Cisco premier integrator, and I've worked for Prosperity for approximately seven months now. We just set up a new networking team predominantly servicing clients within the financial services industry.

We offer various products within the Cisco Secure product line, for example, Cisco Secure Firewall, AnyConnect, and Umbrella. As a Cisco partner, we predominantly deploy Cisco equipment, be it LAN switching or routers. Deploying Cisco Secure products makes sense because then we have one vendor in the network.

When we're deploying Cisco Umbrella, we're predominantly utilizing the DNS Essentials or the DNS Advantage license. We use it as a first layer of defense on the network because everything relies on DNS these days, so if you can capture that traffic and analyze it or analyze those DNS requests, you can very quickly start filtering out things like Command-and-Control and whether there's malware on the environments or shadow IT, for example. So, it can capture and categorize the apps that people use, and if you were to block something, you can very easily block it.

As a Cisco partner, the value we bring to our customers is our years of experience, and our customers can rely on us. We've got a saying in our company that if we look after our clients, we look after our colleagues, and we look after our customers, then we'll all prosper; hence the name Prosperity 24/7. That's our sort of motto, but it's very true. Our customers can trust us. We've got the experience. We've got the links to Cisco. We do all the training, so customers don't have to worry. It's about wrapping the customer up in a blanket and going, "Everything's going to be okay. We're here."

The benefit we get from our Cisco partnership is credibility within the marketplace because everybody has heard of Cisco, and it's probably one of the most deployed network manufacturers in the world involved in so many verticals. There's always a product there. I've been looking at so many products this week at Cisco Live, for example, that anything you can think of is there. There's always new innovation. It's an innovative company.

The feature that we find most valuable is to be able to filter out those web requests that you don't want. In a corporate environment, it can be damaging. It can be damaging to organizations as well. You don't want people going to certain sites. Also, the malware side of things and the Command-and-Control side of things are valuable because you can have serious reputational damage to your organization if there's malware in your environment. To be able to block that at its source is very important.

Umbrella is a constantly evolving product set in terms of what they had maybe four years ago compared to now. The number of features they're developing and facilities within that cloud platform are amazing. Things like data loss prevention (DLP) have been released in the last couple of years. It probably has remote browser isolation (RBI) as well, but I'll have to check that one. So, it's a constantly evolving product set. Our clients might start off on a lower tier of the Umbrella, but over time, they'll go, "Actually I want that feature." And then they'll go from DNS Essentials to DNS Advantage, and then they might start looking at Secure Internet Gateway (SIG), for example, which is just the secure web gateway (SWG). So, there's something for everybody, and as a layer of defense in your network, it's a great product.

With any Cisco product, it's the licensing side of things that needs improvement. Licensing changes and Cisco typically doesn't make it easy for us, but it does evolve. What's good now is that predominantly across the different product sectors within Cisco, you start off with DNS Essentials, Advantage, and even the Catalyst switches. That's now ubiquitous across the Cisco line. They've got to keep it simple on the licensing side so that when I go and talk to clients, I can say, "Right, here you go. With this license, you get these features, but you can always scale up." Once the customers experience Cisco Umbrella, then typically, they start thinking, "What else could I be doing?" You may start off with the DNS Essentials, but then you might move to SWG eventually.

Umbrella's availability is second to none. I remember attending Cisco Live in Barcelona where I went to one of the sessions, and they said that they've had a hundred percent uptime since forever basically, so I don't think they ever had an outage. They've got two DNS servers. They use Anycast, so it's available around the world. It will speed up your web browsing because you'll go to the closest data center. Umbrella pairs with the service providers, so it'll speed up your general web traffic as well.

In our customers' environments, in terms of scalability, absolutely, it's a very simple product to deploy. It's cloud-based, so we don't have to worry about deploying resources locally. Networks rely on DNS anyway. The whole Microsoft stack, whether you open a web browser or use Teams, relies on DNS. So, it's the first step in any web transaction.

I like working with Cisco products because I get excellent support. If it's four o'clock in the morning, I'm in a data center, and something has stopped working, I know I can just reach out to TAC, raise a TAC case, and get help. That's a comfort blanket that surrounds all of us Cisco engineers. We know we can call somebody, and we know we can get through to somebody who will have the answers for us.

I would give Cisco support a solid eight or nine. It's probably difficult to give a 10 because sometimes it depends on who you get as well, but with Cisco TAC, you can always escalate cases as well. So, there's always somebody within Cisco TAC who can help you.

Positive

In the typical deployment model, we integrate it with, for example, the Meraki product line for using Cisco Umbrella directly within the Meraki dashboard. So, you can link it to an API. That's a nice integration. You're not having separate Meraki access points or Meraki MX. You can bring it all together in one place, so you've got a single dashboard. Typically, we've done that. In the bigger organizations, we have done deployments of the virtual appliances because essentially, you want to be able to identify individual users at that point. By using the VAs, you should be able to identify users on the network, and then you can deploy policies based on those user groups.

Cisco Umbrella can be deployed in minutes. In its simplest form, all you need to do is point at the Cisco Umbrella DNS servers, and that's it. It can be literally deployed in minutes. If you want to go to a different use case, for example, where you've got to deploy VAs, that's a bit more difficult, but there's something for everybody. It can be as simple or as complex as your environment requires.

I've always worked with Cisco. I've been working with Cisco products for the last 20 years. We do have other products that we can sell for a lower price point, for example, but typically, I like using Cisco products.

To any customers who want to evaluate Umbrella, the first thing I would recommend looking at would be the product sheets within Cisco. Understand the technology, understand the features that are available, and then decide what level of Umbrella or what licensing level you require to meet your business requirements. If it's just protecting some guest WiFis, for example, then it'll be a very simple deployment. If you've got Meraki kits, you can easily link those two pieces together.

Talos receives so much traffic. I did one of the sessions yesterday with the guys from Talos, and the amount of web traffic that comes into Talos for them to analyze is huge. So, as a repository of what's going on and a view of what's going on the Internet with this new malware, they're very quickly going to be able to react to that. Even with just the behavioral type analysis in terms of what constitutes bad behavior on a network, they can very quickly analyze and deploy a new solution. They update things like Umbrella, and as a central repository, it feeds into Talos, and then Talos can inform the rest of the security community about what's going on and what things you might need to block, so Talos overall has a positive effect for our clients. For them to do it themselves would be impossible. You need somebody on the Internet, and Talos provide that service. It's about control and visibility, and those certainly are the features that Talos can bring to the table.

I'd rate Umbrella a solid nine out of ten. It's probably difficult to get any product in a 10, but they are always constantly developing it. So, if you come back in a year's time, there'll always be new features than what's available today.

We use it to protect our users from getting to any known bad domains.

It does what it's supposed to do, protecting us from getting to somewhere that we shouldn't.

The solution also helps us remediate threats more quickly. Examples are when an email campaign comes in with malicious links, or if they're on a website like Facebook which is full of junk that doesn't need to come through.

Domain blocking is among the most valuable features. It keeps people from accidentally clicking on something they shouldn't. Also, if I see an email that comes through, I can pick out bad domains that we want to block and make custom policies to block them.

In addition, when it comes to hybrid work it's pretty effective. We've got the agents. We can protect people inside our building and, when they're using their laptops out in the field, they're still protected. It's working well.

The single pane of glass management is also pretty helpful because we don't have to hunt for what we're trying to work on.

Getting to some of the reporting features is something that could be improved. When I am tracking someone that has done something, my first hint is usually an email, because I've got those scheduled to come in every so often. But then I've got to log in, dig into that user, find the time period, and then export it. There's a lot of waiting involved through all of those steps.

It would be helpful if there were an embedded link in the email so that when it says it blocked something in particular, I wouldn't have to click through five or six different things to get what was blocked in that email. With a link like that, I could just click from within the notification email and it would take me straight to that page.

I've been using Cisco Umbrella for five years.

I haven't had any issues when using it.

Scaling it is pretty easy. Every time we need to put it on a machine, it's just part of the deployment process.

There are a lot of features that I haven't used. They've been doing a lot of work on it recently and I was talking to one of our Cisco reps who talked about some things we can do with it that we're not doing yet.

I haven't had to use technical support.

It's continuously deployed because, if we wipe out a computer, we've got to put the agent back on it. If we have to put it on a Windows machine, it's easy. If we're trying to deploy it to a Mac through Meraki, it's impossible. The method of deployment for a Mac, and the features available in Meraki, are not compatible at all. Getting it to the point where you could deploy a Cisco product with a Cisco product would be beneficial.

Umbrella is pretty invisible to our employees. Most of them don't know we're using it. There isn't a lot of user training involved, as long as your security people can get in there and do what they need to do.

It's a great tool because you can effectively block a lot of things that can infect your machines. People don't realize they're getting something that's malicious.

Overall, it has been pretty helpful for what we're using it for.

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 the solution for DNS security and web filtering. Our industries include banking and insurance. 

The customer experience is very good, and the product improves security posture. 

Cisco Umbrella is difficult to manage and needs to include a dashboard. It needs to improve pricing as well. 

I have been using the product for three years. 

I rate Cisco Umbrella's stability a nine out of ten. 

I rate the tool's scalability an eight out of ten. 

The tool's deployment is easy; I rate it a nine out of ten. The speed of deployment depends on various factors, including our communication with other customer contacts.

I rate the tool's pricing a five out of ten. 

Cisco Umbrella is the best solution for DNS security in the market. Our customers are enterprise businesses. I rate it an eight out of ten. 

Most of the time, it's for security reasons in terms of looking at what DNS requests are being done and other things like that.

It has certainly saved us time. If we go and look at what's rejected on the requests from the hospital itself, it has saved about 5% or 6% time.

It's there to keep everything secure. Hospitals are a very nice target for attacks. We have been under an attack from Russia once, which was a DDoS attack.

It secures our infrastructure from end to end so we can detect and remediate threats.

The protection from users doing stupid things is valuable. The dashboard gives me the information I need.

Its price could be better.

I've been using it for about two years.

It's very stable. I've never seen any problems with it.

It's perfect for the things we have with it. There is a quick resolution. There are no problems at all. I'd rate them a nine out of ten.

Positive

I've not used a similar solution. We went for Cisco Umbrella because they are delivering good products. We also have all Cisco switches in place, and then we have Cisco ACI and DNA Center. We only don't have Cisco firewalls.

I am not aware of any tools that we could consolidate or get rid of by using Cisco Umbrella because it was installed about five or six years before I came here.

Cisco is expensive. For example, we are looking at Nexus Dashboard, and it's costing about 250,000 euros. I ask, "What do I get from it?" I'm still not convinced that we have to spend on it, so pricing is a problem.

It's a very good product. I'd rate it an eight out of ten. Overall, I am satisfied with the product.