Cisco Umbrella Reviews

I am a Solutions Architect in a mining company, and the size of the company is around five to 10,000 employees.

We wanted to replace an existing solution and give a better experience to our users, and we wanted to have a superior solution that could give us insights into how secure our users are and what their browsing behaviors are to track down and narrow down issues. Of course, the first and foremost use case is protecting our users. Cisco Umbrella gave us all those things in one and having it integrated into our environment was a very seamless process, and we're very happy using it right now.

It gives you a single pane of glass to see what's going on with your environment and your DNS queries. It has consolidated a lot of previous efforts into the visibility of what's going on.

It saves time. You're protecting your users in a manner that you don't need to do anything after. If, for example, somebody tries to open a malicious website or tries to download something, it just won't allow that. That's it. Previously, there were loopholes and ways for users to get around the proxy, which gives you more work. In that sense, we're saving the support team's time. When you're investigating a problem, it quickly gives you insights into what you're looking for as simple as possible. You can see when a user was accessing a website, was it blocked or was it allowed? Of course, you could test connectivity for specific users and computers. That saves time in troubleshooting. It saves hours per week in comparison to the previous solution. 

The agent that gets installed on the endpoints or on people's laptops and devices is a Cisco AnyConnect Umbrella module. It's one of the most impressive things because you are able to protect your users anywhere they are.

Its reliability and the response time of the support team can be better. 

In terms of features, I know Cisco Umbrella has a lot of potential, and I'm not sure if we're using it to its full potential. I'm not aware of all the functionality, and for the functionality for which we're using it, it has been great. There probably is one place for improvement. We'll love to see any new features, new functionalities, and maybe better integration with other cloud platforms, but for us, it's good as it's now.

We've been using Cisco Umbrella for around four and a half years.

In terms of availability, we've seen it down a couple of times. It has become very stable recently, but we've seen it down. Maybe that's one area that they can improve on. It was not for a long time, but it caused a little panic among our users.

Scalability is happening with ease with Cisco Umbrella because you're either deploying another appliance in your branch office or another office, or you're pointing the endpoints to the existing appliances in your head office or any other place, and you're good to go. It's very scalable and easy to use, and you can have a new office ready in a day or less.

It's great. We've had some cases and issues, but they were resolved quickly and in a timely manner, and we're happy with it. I'd rate them an eight out of ten. They could be a little quicker, but technically, they're great.

Positive

The previous solution was a proxy solution. I'd not state the name of the solution, but it was a proxy solution. It was heavy. It was slow, and there was no easy way for tracking old things. And of course, you can't protect your users outside of the company environment.

I found it easy to implement. Cisco Umbrella has great documentation and great support teams, and implementing it was very easy for us. We just deployed the appliances, and we got through the initial basic policies. We were prepared to do it, so for us, it was very easy.

We did it ourselves. The documentation was good. We're experienced architects and network-oriented guys, so for us, it was just a great experience doing it.

The return on investment is in terms of time savings. It saves time and helps focus on other important things instead of digging into problems with users.

Because we're mostly Cisco-oriented, the solution was obvious. It was already integrated with all of our equipment. We already had Cisco AnyConnect, so it was just a matter of adding the module to it. We're Cisco-oriented, and that was just an obvious choice.

Do your math and check the competitors, but in the end, you won't find a much better solution that's already integrated with your Cisco environment. If you are a Cisco company, that's the way to go.

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

We use Cisco Umbrella to secure our gateway. All of the DNS forwarding coming out of the company from any site or all the DNS requests are forwarded through Cisco Umbrella, and then they determine if that is a safe address and if the content coming back is safe. They will either reject the addressing out of hand, or they'll look at the Layer 7 content and reject that from making it back to us.

We are using the Secure Internet Gateway (SIG) Advantage package. In terms of deployment, effectively, it's deployed from our private cloud. It's in our data closet on our servers.

It enables us to finally allow laptops to be used as workstations and allow data to leave the building. In the past, laptops were only used for VPN access, but they would connect back to their data inside the company. This has allowed us to have a level of confidence that they're protected as if they were behind our firewall. So, now, we've got work-from-home people who literally have their workstations with them.

We have six sites with 60 to 70 users. The baseline configuration allows for additional protection for any DNS requests as they leave those sites, and then the secondary policy is for the mobile devices as they leave the premises. When they're connected to public WiFi, they have an additional policy that kicks in for that time that they're not connected back to the company. So, when they're on public WiFi without a VPN, the tool will actually put that second policy in place that's more aggressive and offers a higher level of protection when it's not sitting behind the firewall. All that is automated. It's all built into the agent.

We don't allow WiFi inside of our network for connection to our actual business network. As soon as a device is docked, it disables WiFi on that mobile device.

When we have laptops that leave the building, they could connect to public WiFi before they establish a VPN connection back into the company. For that duration or that period of time when they're not docked in the network or on a VPN, they effectively don't have that full layer of security that I provide inside the building. This tool stands in during that period of time, and we extend the security settings through their basic firewall or their cloud-based firewall at that time. So, we do content filtering and control access, but they also are looking at new domains, IP addresses, and bad requests. They're blocking them on my behalf when a laptop is not sitting behind our security appliances.

There are a couple of interface issues. I know that they say that there are feature enhancements that are noted. For example, we've got the Cisco Meraki security appliances, and there, we geofence our company to where we're allowed to send and receive traffic. So, in our case, by default, we only allow traffic to six different countries, which allows us to effectively prevent traffic for the majority of bad players in the world, but they don't give you an easy way to do that in Cisco Umbrella. With Cisco Meraki, I can specify or pick the countries. I can say that I want to only allow traffic from these six countries, and I'm done. With Cisco Umbrella, I have to rely on the fact that they're going to prevent traffic to other countries. They're going to decide if it's good or bad. I can't geofence out. I can plot top-level domains, but .com and .net go global. I can certainly block a China (CN) or a Russia (RU) domain, but that doesn't give me the same level of granularity. 

Apparently, Cisco Umbrella has got that as a feature request to allow an administrator to say, "I specifically only want traffic to and from these countries. Everything else should be dumped." That way, when they're sitting behind my network or they go out in the wild, they have that same level of traffic being blocked.

I have been using it for 14 to 15 years.

We've had no issues. It has done exactly what it's supposed to do.

It is cloud-based. So, scalability should not be an issue. 

Any increase in its usage is all relative to the growth of our staff. Currently, we deploy the laptops for people who need to work from home or are traveling between the banks. That's roughly about 20% of our total staff. Some people aren't going to be working from home, and some of their jobs can't be done from home. They have no need for mobile devices. If there is a need to work from home, its usage will increase. It is there if we need it to scale, but at this point, it is not scheduled to change.

Once I became a paying customer, it was much better. The preliminary training is there, but when you get into the nuances and the details of some of its capabilities, you need to talk to tech support. Once you're a paid customer, you get direct access, and then it's good. When I'm able to get a hold of them, their technical support is a 10 out of 10.

Positive

I didn't use any similar solution previously. 

I was a hundred percent involved in its deployment. We had a couple of issues. The proof of concept was done without a lot of planning. So, there were some mistakes made along the way. If I was doing it again the second time, I wouldn't make the same mistakes. 

The default configurations have your baselines. Those are never supposed to get changed, and I changed and tweaked those for our proof of concept. After a couple of weeks, I had some additional guidance from the Cisco Umbrella team. You leave the baseline configuration, and then you clone and create a new configuration that sits in front of it. So, everyone gets the baseline, and you don't change that. If you want to change it, you make a new policy and then make the changes to that. If you change the baseline default policy and you make a mistake in it, you've to back that all out. If you make it in the new policy, in the worst case, you just delete it, and automatically everyone goes back to baseline. So, there's still a policy in effect. That was a training issue that should have been resolved. Now that I've done it, if somebody asks me, I would say that this is the way you've got to do it.

It was just me taking care of its deployment. In terms of maintenance, once it's configured, unless you're retweaking and adding or removing something that was blocked, it pretty much runs itself.

I have less maintenance to resolve, fix, and reconfigure VPN clients personally, and the feedback from the end-users is that they're more productive.

We were using the free version, and we implemented the paid version about two months ago.

I'm paying a fair price, but everything is negotiable with Cisco. One of the benefits that I got by having Cisco Umbrella is the licensing of the Cisco AnyConnect VPN client. There has always been an issue for years and years with Cisco Meraki in terms of VPN clients and using the native built-in Windows client. It keeps reconfiguring itself. By using Cisco AnyConnect as the VPN client, it's not affected by Windows patching or people typing in passwords by mistake. It's more resilient and doesn't change. With just Meraki solution, there was an extra expense for the Cisco AnyConnect VPN client. By having Cisco Umbrella, that licensing is now included.

There were a couple of other options, and I discussed them with another consultant. As a regulated industry, we have to do vendor management, and vendors have to be vetted. So, Cisco was already a vetted vendor. There are other companies that do the same thing, but Cisco didn't require me to do any more vetting. They were already a vendor.

When it's configured the way it's supposed to work, it turns itself on and off based on the status of the VPN or the dock condition. Once it's configured, it does exactly what it's supposed to do. 

If you're doing a proof of concept on it, fully understand how the policies are configured and what the flow is. You should understand the hierarchical status of the policies to configure it right the first time. You don't really want to guess it.

I would rate it a 10 out of 10.

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.

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. 

Our customers use Umbrella for a security network. They want to have DNS connectivity and drop traffic before it becomes dodgy. 

Clients implement Umbrella with the full proxy. 

Umbrella enables customers to be secure. We are happy with this and this is the most important benefit for customers.

DNS is the most valuable feature of Umbrella. We want to have DNS integration with data directories and we have customers asking about the Azure Integration. 

We try to fit all the Cisco Secure products together. This is the value the customers can see as well. We enable the Firewalls, Umbrella, and AMP so that the customer can see the whole view of what Cisco is doing. 

Our customers want to be able to work remotely. They want Umbrella to work securely from the office and to work securely outside of the office. 

We have been using Umbrella for years now. We have an Umbrella internally as well. I sell Umbrella to customers. We offer the full setup to them.

We are resellers and integrators.

The stability is getting better.

The scalability is fine. The central management, that comes with most solutions, is really good. It's easier for us to go from two devices to 20 devices.

We have had quite a good experience with their support so I can't complain about it. Most of the time TAC cases are quite straightforward and do not take a long time to fix.

Positive

Our clients deploy on public cloud, private cloud, hybrid cloud, on-premise, or SaaS.

I am an engineer and do the initial deployment for them and make tweaks until it works for them. 

The complexity of the deployment will depend on the client's requirements. Some of them have straightforward requirements and some of them are quite detailed. The implementation itself is fine but there can be details where we need to check the documentation and make sure we're following what they require. 

Customers use the Firewall Migration for the migration mostly from the ASAs. We do the ASA to FTD migration, which doesn't work well.

Two or three engineers are required for the deployment. The installation is done by different engineers.  

We also do the maintenance. So whatever we deployed, we also support. We do all the support requirements, updating and reviewing the deployment that we did. We do the config that is required. For example, for the migration, if we deploy something, we come back to review what we did because we want to make sure that the customer is more secure than it was before. So we just rerun the same configuration, trying to find out if there's a gap that we can fix and make sure that the customer is secure.

The pricing changes too fast. We get the license and we need to relicense it because they already made changes to it. We always need to be on top of the licenses because they're always changing.

Cisco Talos seems to be working fine for our customers. 

My advice to somebody considering this solution is to try it. It's probably the best option to try it and see if it works. Do a proof of concept and proof of value for the customer.

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.

Our clients use Cisco Umbrella compared with SD-WAN or Meraki solutions. They use layer 7 firewall and web proxy in most use cases and fewer DNS security functionalities.

Cisco Umbrella has replaced on-premises firewalls in our client's branches. Our client had one central cloud solution, and now, they no longer need the local firewall.

Our clients have found that Cisco Umbrella increases its security posture because there is a central policy that fits everything.

Though Cisco Talos is usually part of the backend, it is mandatory to have a good solution.

We've been implementing Cisco Umbrella for three years.

I have not seen any issues with scalability.

Cisco's technical support is pretty good. When a solution is available, they will find it. On a scale from one to ten with ten being the best, I'd rate Cisco's technical support at nine.

Positive

We sell both Cisco and Zscaler. If the client already has a Cisco solution, then Umbrella is usually a better fit. In cases when a customer already uses Zscaler, has another SD-WAN solution, or has a different vendor, Zscaler may be the first choice.

As a Cisco Secure reseller, we bring value to our customers through our technicians and engineers who consult with them and implement the solution. This is a benefit from our partner side.

The initial deployment is quite easy. It's internal, and with a few clicks, Cisco Umbrella can be up and running.

Cisco should make the solution cheaper.

The locks and management could be better. The product is fairly new, and it may take some time to get all the features up and running.

Overall, I would rate Cisco Umbrella an eight on a scale from one to ten.

What I find most valuable about Cisco Umbrella is its ease of use. I also value the clearness of the categories. We have not experienced any issues or incidents with the categories. However, we are looking more deeply at the product now. 

We are very new users of the solution and are still in the exploration stages, but we are happy with the product thus far. However, there are some features available in Fortinet and Palo Alto that are not available in Cisco, like objects, for example. I would like to see Cisco enable us to get objects from the internet. I would also like to be able to choose groups. 

I have been using Cisco Umbrella for two to three months now. 

For most of our technical support needs, we mostly go through our partner. However, for some infrastructure-related inquiries, we have had to contact Cisco's technical support and we were happy with the experience.  

Positive

The initial setup was simple. Deployment at our main sites took about three to four weeks. 

We received help from a local partner, NTT Global, during the deployment. They helped us set up Meraki and Umbrella. 

We hope to see a return on investment with Cisco Umbrella. We have a big team managing the infrastructure, so we hope to save time in the day-to-day protection of the tower, which would be the return on investment.

Globally, we also hope to save time on the LAN. We aim for a single pane of glass management model with the dashboard. 

From what I remember about the pricing, Cisco Umbrella is a bit more expensive than the quotes we got from its competitors. 

We looked at several products, including Fortinet and Palo Alto. We experienced a bug with Fortinet during testing and ultimately ended up going with Cisco Meraki products. We have not had an incident yet with Cisco Umbrella.

The solution helped us save time and this was a major reason we chose it. We expect to save 15% to 20% in time.

We are aiming to consolidate our entire network and LAN infrastructure with Cisco Umbrella. We are on the way to achieving that with this solution.