Cisco Umbrella and Azure DNS compete in network security and DNS management. Azure DNS seems to have the upper hand due to its integration with Azure services, along with scalability and performance features.
Features: Cisco Umbrella is known for its straightforward management interface, comprehensive threat protection, and reliable security capabilities. Azure DNS stands out for its robust integration with other Azure services, offering scalable DNS management and performance-oriented features.
Room for Improvement: Cisco Umbrella users suggest enhancements in reporting and analytics tools, as well as expanding its integration capabilities. Azure DNS feedback indicates a need for more intuitive learning resources, simplified configurations, and better cross-platform integration.
Ease of Deployment and Customer Service: Cisco Umbrella is praised for its swift deployment and responsive customer support, ideal for quick setups. Azure DNS, although more complex due to its extensive features, benefits from seamless cloud integration and robust technical support.
Pricing and ROI: Cisco Umbrella is considered cost-effective, delivering substantial ROI through its security benefits. Azure DNS, with higher initial costs, provides value with advanced features and scalability, offering better long-term value.
They are very knowledgeable, not only about their product but about general DNS protocols, from performance to global interconnectivity.
They provide good updates about progress or status on their side, and we can even discuss the next steps.
They communicate well and provide feedback that's not only technical but easy to understand if you're not technical.
I would rate customer support ten out of ten due to the excellent assistance throughout the POC process.
We can monitor our endpoints and points of presence around the world.
For example, I would like to be able to say, 'Show me the top 10 records by total queries' in an easy-to-digest format.
Right now, as far as I understand, there is no way to do atomic changes to a DNS configuration. You need to make changes record by record and apply.
Making it more flexible and easy to deploy, particularly when integrating with other technologies like Active Directory and proxies, would be beneficial.
We run more than 4.5 billion queries per month on our DNS, so it's pretty critical that they can handle that volume and it's been going pretty well so far.
The solution has helped us to meet SLAs and customers’ demands, without adding complexity.
This product provides the scalability we need to help meet SLAs and customers' demands without adding complexity, which is very important to us.
Cisco Umbrella is scalable for our company.
We used to pay about $20,000 with Dyn every month, for lower volume than we're doing right now, but it had none of the features that we have available with NS1, so it was worth it for us.
I would say that you get what you pay for.
NS1's pricing is much more aggressive than its competitors in the market.
We have been using NS1 for a long period of time, and we have not had any major outages on the NS1 side that lead to any outage on our side.
We haven't experienced any downtime whatsoever in the past three years.
Especially, since we have the Dedicated DNS as well, our setup of NS1, as a whole, the Managed and the Dedicated, is very stable.
Using Pulsar with telemetry monitoring between the customer and the endpoint, we are able to detect traffic and route it appropriately, which ensures the uptime of our applications and web properties.
Indeed, the API is at the core of how we use Managed DNS. No one goes to the dashboard or manually clicks anything. Everything goes via the API, and we perform hundreds of changes every minute.
NS1 Managed DNS has helped improve our end user experience, which has sped up our time to market.
The DNS layer security provided by Cisco Umbrella is very effective for our security posture, offering us vast improvements in visibility over DNS queries and potential threats.
Why
In a 24/7 world, customers demand applications, websites, and content that load instantly and are always on. When those connections are unreliable or slow, businesses don’t meet customer expectations, causing customers to leave. When that occurs, revenue may suffer.
What
IBM NS1 Connect delivers the high-performance, reliable, secure network connectivity that businesses need to meet increasingly sophisticated customer expectations. Leveraging a global network with a 100% uptime SLA, IBM has the capacity and scale to meet the needs of any business. IBM NS1 Connect takes performance to the next level, powering the sophisticated needs of enterprises with complex network infrastructures.
How
IBM NS1 Connect provides network connectivity solutions that give networking teams the visibility, control and automation needed to help ensure your business stays online by steering traffic to the ideal network connections for any given moment. IBM NS1 Connect also enables IT teams to identify network performance anomalies through deep insights into DNS data flows, allowing them to identify configuration problems or network issues that affect performance so they can quickly resolve them.
Details
IBM NS1 Connect is a managed service that provides authoritative, premium DNS and advanced, customizable traffic steering that improves application performance and network resilience. Revenue-generating applications require authoritative DNS resolution to keep critical applications and websites online. Unless your DNS infrastructure is always-on and resilient, network reliability and user experience will suffer, your network reliability may suffer, resulting in poor user experiences if revenue-generating critical applications and websites are not online. IBM NS1 Connect’s always-on, API-first architecture provides fast, secure connections to users anywhere in the world with premium DNS and advanced, customizable traffic steering. It also enables your IT teams to efficiently monitor networks, deploy changes and conduct routine maintenance.
IBM NS1 Connect uses the Domain Name System (DNS) to ensure that websites and applications are:
Designed for enterprises looking to optimize their DNS performance, IBM NS1 Connect is a managed service delivering authoritative DNS and advanced traffic steering that improves application performance and network resilience and provides fast, secure connections to users anywhere in the world. NS1 Connect streamlines DNS management by automating both simple and complex DNS configuration tasks via API and preconfigured integrations, so you can spend more time on higher-value work.
IBM NS1 Connect is delivered through our unified delivery platform. The cloud-based platform gives networking teams the visibility, control and automation needed to help ensure your business stays online by steering traffic to the ideal network connections for any given moment. IBM NS1 Connect solutions also enable IT teams to identify network performance anomalies through deep insights into DNS data flows, allowing them to identify configuration problems or network issues that affect performance so they can quickly resolve them.
For enterprises looking to further optimize DNS performance, IBM NS1 Connect offers rich DNS data analytics to streamline the identification of the root cause of anomalies within traffic.
IBM NS1 Connect Features
IBM NS1 Connect helps enterprises modernize and optimize networking infrastructure to provide customers with faster connections to websites, applications, services and content.
Azure DNS is a hosting service for DNS domains, providing name resolution using Microsoft Azure infrastructure. By hosting your domains in Azure, you can manage your DNS records using the same credentials, APIs, tools, and billing as your other Azure services.
Cisco Umbrella offers flexible, cloud-delivered security according to users’ requirements Cisco Umbrella includes secure web gateway, firewall, and cloud access security broker (CASB) functionality all delivered from a single cloud security service. Cisco Umbrella’s protection is extended to devices, remote users, and distributed locations anywhere. As company employees work from many locations and devices, Cisco Umbrella is the easiest way to effectively protect users everywhere in minutes.
Cisco Umbrella uses machine learning to search for, identify, and even predict malicious domains. By learning from internet activity patterns, this DNS-layer security solution can automatically identify attacker infrastructure being staged for the next threat. These domains are then proactively blocked, protecting networks from potential compromise. Cisco Umbrella analyzes terabytes of data in real time across all markets, geographies, and protocols.
Cisco Umbrella works with leading IT companies to integrate its security enforcement and intelligence. Built with a bidirectional API, Cisco Umbrella makes it easy to extend protection from on-premises security appliances to cloud controlled devices and sites.
Cisco Umbrella is suitable for small businesses without dedicated security professionals, as well as for multinational enterprises with complex environments.
Why use Cisco Umbrella?
Reviews from Real Users
Cisco Umbrella stands out among its competitors for a number of reasons. Some of the major ones are its DNS-based protection, ability to protect users no matter where they are located, stability, and high performance.
Daniel B., a network specialist at Syswind Kft, writes, “We primarily use the solution as cloud security for our branches. It protects us from direct internet outbreaks. It makes for good flexibility. The solution is very easy to manage. We found the initial setup, for example, to be quite simple. Efficient protection on the DNS level and even higher. The sandboxing feature analyses and handles the complicated security risks.”
Victor M., SOC & Security Services Director at BEST, notes, “It provides security for the remote workers and it helps to improve enterprise security in a very easy way. We mainly enjoy web software protection capabilities. It prevents the end-users from getting into bad sites or sites that potentially could have malware or could be phishing. It helps end-users avoid the wrong sites. The solution works very smoothly. The user interface is good.”
OpenDNS is a part of Cisco providing a suite of consumer products aimed at making the internet faster, safer, and more reliable.
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