Cisco Umbrella and F5 BIG-IP DNS are both prominent products in the DNS security and management category. Based on the evaluation, Cisco Umbrella has a slight edge with its extensive DNS-based protection and flexible deployment options, while F5 BIG-IP DNS stands out significantly in global traffic management and DNS security features.
Features: Cisco Umbrella provides robust DNS-based protection that includes web content filtering, malware protection, and command-and-control callback blocking. This suite of features is essential for compliance in educational settings and organizations with budget constraints. F5 BIG-IP DNS offers exceptional security features such as DNS monitoring, DDoS mitigation, and scalability to support large enterprise networks.
Room for Improvement: Cisco Umbrella could enhance its offering by providing more granular reporting, detailed analytics, and better third-party integration. Additionally, improvements in policy management and flexible pricing structures would be beneficial. F5 BIG-IP DNS would gain from enhanced cloud integration, reduced management complexity, and improved identity management features.
Ease of Deployment and Customer Service: Cisco Umbrella supports hybrid and public cloud environments, allowing quick deployment, and is known for its excellent customer service, although there can be occasional delays. F5 BIG-IP DNS is primarily on-premises and is more complex to deploy, requiring skilled personnel, but offers responsive customer service with room for better communication ease.
Pricing and ROI: Cisco Umbrella's pricing is fair but considered high by some users despite the valuable ROI it offers through reduced malware incidents and increased productivity. F5 BIG-IP DNS is expensive, providing significant value to large enterprises with its high-performance features, although the price could be hindering for smaller businesses.
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.
F5® BIG-IP® DNS distributes DNS and user application requests based on business policies, data center and cloud service conditions, user location, and application performance. BIG-IP DNS is commonly configured as a full proxy to provide global server load balancing (GSLB) for applications and DNS across architectures, and across the globe.
The BIG-IP platform delivers DNS services with visibility, reporting, and analysis; scales and secures DNS responses geographically to survive increased traffic or threats; delivers a real-time DNSSEC solution; designed to provide availability of global applications in all cloud environments.
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