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Cisco Umbrella vs Microsoft Defender for Cloud Apps vs Zscaler Internet Access comparison

 

Comparison Buyer's Guide

Executive Summary

Review summaries and opinions

We asked business professionals to review the solutions they use. Here are some excerpts of what they said:
 

ROI

Sentiment score
7.5
Cisco Umbrella improves ROI through enhanced security, operational efficiency, cost savings, and increased satisfaction, driving continued license renewals.
Sentiment score
7.7
Microsoft Defender for Cloud Apps delivers 35%-60% cost savings through enhanced security, operational efficiency, and seamless integration with Microsoft products.
Sentiment score
7.5
Zscaler Internet Access offers financial and security benefits, saving costs by eliminating legacy systems and reducing device infections.
The biggest return on investment so far has been visibility, knowing what we have in our environment.
 

Customer Service

Sentiment score
8.0
Cisco Umbrella's customer service is praised for efficiency, professionalism, and excellent technical support, with some room for response improvement.
Sentiment score
7.2
Microsoft Defender for Cloud Apps support is generally positive, but users experience varying response times and expertise levels.
Sentiment score
7.1
Zscaler Internet Access's technical support is responsive and competent, with user ratings typically between seven to nine out of ten.
I would rate customer support ten out of ten due to the excellent assistance throughout the POC process.
Cisco's support is fantastic, providing assistance when needed, especially during the initial installation process.
Their customer service is pretty good, but it's frustrating to go through three or four channels before reaching the right person.
I find customer support to be quite adequate
 

Scalability Issues

Sentiment score
8.1
Cisco Umbrella offers seamless scalability and integration, supporting various organizational sizes and global user bases without infrastructure challenges.
Sentiment score
8.3
Microsoft Defender for Cloud Apps offers scalability and flexibility, easily integrating apps and managing large enterprises' security needs.
Sentiment score
7.8
Zscaler Internet Access offers excellent scalability, enabling seamless growth across various environments with efficient management and flexibility.
Cisco Umbrella is scalable for our company.
It is a scalable solution but requires improvement in specific areas.
For what I know about the log collector and how much data it can take in, it is super scalable and capable of handling high workloads.
I find Zscaler Internet Access to be highly scalable, which was one of the reasons for choosing it.
 

Stability Issues

Sentiment score
8.3
Cisco Umbrella is praised for strong stability, exceptional uptime, and minimal issues, earning high ratings from satisfied users.
Sentiment score
8.0
Microsoft Defender for Cloud Apps offers reliable performance with minimal downtime, overcoming occasional external issues and network-related latency.
Sentiment score
7.7
Zscaler Internet Access is reliable and secure, with minor regional issues and challenges like SSL inspection and latency.
I have not experienced any major stability issues with Cisco Umbrella.
I would rate it a ten because I have not experienced any stability issues so far with Defender for Cloud Apps.
Like any other Microsoft product, the uptime is good.
Zscaler Internet Access is very stable, and I would rate its stability as nine out of ten.
 

Room For Improvement

Users seek improvements for Cisco Umbrella in integration, analytics, security features, user interface, IPv6 support, licensing, and compatibility.
Users suggest better integration, pricing, and UI for Apple and Microsoft tools, with enhancements in reporting, support, and threat protection.
Zscaler Internet Access requires improvements in integration, usability, performance, connectivity, and feature enhancements like VPN and multi-factor authentication.
Making it more flexible and easy to deploy, particularly when integrating with other technologies like Active Directory and proxies, would be beneficial.
The product can only shield a small area, making it less effective for larger spaces or multiple users.
For data loss prevention, it would be useful to be able to drill down into the kind of data being transferred over CloudApp.
We are having trouble with our continuous reporting configuration and struggling with configuring the collector properly with our log parsing.
One feature I am missing is the ability to connect automatically to internal monitoring systems.
 

Setup Cost

Cisco Umbrella pricing is seen as mixed, offering flexible plans but sometimes considered costly compared to competitors.
Microsoft Defender for Cloud Apps is cost-effective with Microsoft 365 bundles but pricey separately, with varied licensing complexity.
Zscaler Internet Access is costly but valued by users for its features and global reach despite extra fees.
The only cost associated is the license cost unless additional solutions need to be integrated with Umbrella, which would incur extra costs.
Zscaler Internet Access is recognized as an expensive solution.
 

Valuable Features

Cisco Umbrella provides DNS-based network security, blocking threats, enhancing productivity, and offering seamless integration and comprehensive threat protection.
Microsoft Defender for Cloud Apps offers integrated security, real-time alerts, and strong threat detection for comprehensive enterprise cloud protection.
Zscaler Internet Access offers robust security with low latency, scalability, and ease of use for distributed organizations.
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.
Cisco Umbrella offers DNS layer security, a secure web gateway, and cloud access security broker functionality.
The ability to sanction unsanctioned apps using Secure Score benchmarking, included in Cloud, is also beneficial.
We have also locked down our consent apps, so users can no longer consent on their own behalf to create apps in our environment.
The most valuable feature for me is the ability to see how my network and traffic looks with modules like analytics and insights.
 

Mindshare comparison

Domain Name System (DNS) Security
Cloud Access Security Brokers (CASB)
Secure Web Gateways (SWG)
 

Featured Reviews

Alessandro Braga - PeerSpot reviewer
Has comprehensive reporting and scales easily
The reports and notifications are the most useful part of the platform. As soon as you deploy the security layers, the reporting is very comprehensive. It helps you to have, at a glance, a clear view of what's going on. The integration between Cisco Secure solutions is pretty good. We have been able to deliver the solution in a few days. The integration of Umbrella and Meraki is literally one click away from the customer. One of the reasons why we chose Umbrella was its capability to perform end-to-end detection of malware and web traffic. In the last two years, we have been covered, detection has been faster, and we have been able to contain some potential threats along the way. We use the Umbrella stack from DNS protection to web and content protection. Our workforce is made up of 150 Macs; thus, we use Mac as a client. We have some PCs and integration with the network in our co-working spaces. Utilizing Cisco Secure has helped us save time. Being a nimble organization, we don't have IT staff who are fully dedicated to security. The maintenance is also not very time-consuming. In terms of the amount of time saved, it would be half an FTE a year, given the fact that we are informed and notified when threats arise. In terms of operating expenditures, we have been able to negotiate a better cyber insurance rate with our insurance company due to the fact that we are covered by Umbrella. Another benefit of using Cisco Umbrella is application scanning. We have been able to understand how many other applications we were consuming in the cloud, address them, and save money. Without Cisco Umbrella, we would not have realized that we had so many cloud applications in the company. We have been able to close at least four or five applications that were duplicates of others that we were already using in the company. We have realized approximately 10,000 to 12,000 euros a year of immediate savings in an organization of 150 people, which is quite significant.
Jagadeesh Gunasekaran - PeerSpot reviewer
Saves us time, has good visibility, and a single dashboard
The solution is user-friendly and provides great visibility into threats. There are easy options available for specific workflow inspections. We can also get support by going through the Microsoft documentation, which is straightforward. Microsoft Defender for Cloud Apps helps us prioritize threats across our enterprise. It covers us from a compliance perspective and protects our organization's data. Data protection is a very important aspect of any new organization, as we need to protect our data from both external attacks and insider threats. Microsoft Defender for Cloud Apps helps us monitor for abnormal activity by insiders, which is one of the most important access points for attackers today. Additionally, the different cloud apps that Defender for Cloud Apps supports provide us with much more visibility into potential threats and activities on the internet. We have integrated Microsoft Defender for Cloud Apps alerts with Sentinel. The integration is straightforward. We can find the configuration details on Microsoft's official documentation website. If we are familiar with how Microsoft products work, we will be able to follow the instructions clearly. Microsoft Defender for Cloud Apps and Sentinel work natively together to deliver coordinated detection and response across our environment. Our integrated Microsoft solutions provide comprehensive threat protection, covering most of the tactics and techniques relevant to the MITRE ATT&CK framework. Sentinel allows us to ingest data from our entire ecosystem. When implementing an SIEM solution, there are always prerequisites such as Active Directory logs, security logs, firewall logs, and DNS logs. These are important logs that need to be ingested into the environment. Sentinel has many third-party connectors available that make integrations straightforward. Microsoft provides the configuration details in the Sentinel platform. It is important to integrate all relevant log sources into the SIEM solution so that we can detect and be alerted to any type of threat factor, whether it is from an internal or external source. Integrating third-party solutions into the platform requires a separate configuration, but Microsoft provides the necessary information. However, we need to have the appropriate permissions to execute these setups. Sentinel provides a centralized dashboard that covers threat management and configuration. It gives us complete insight into what entities are accessing, as well as full details for investigation. We can see how the alerts and threats are relevant to suspicious activities, whether they are related to malicious IP addresses, suspicious ASHAs, or any other indicators of compromise. All of this relevant data can be seen in a single pane. Recently, Microsoft introduced a new investigation experience in a single pane. This means that we can now get a lot of details in a single pane, without having to go there and execute a query. There are a lot of new insights being developed in the Sentinel platform these days. It has software intelligence. They recently introduced Microsoft Defender Threat Intelligence, which covers almost all IOCs. This protects organizational assets from threats and suspicious traffic associated with IOCs. If a match is found, alerts are generated. This is a very interesting feature. Another great feature is automation and logic apps. We can create a number of operations, such as posting in a team's channel if a severe incident occurs or sending an email notification. There are many operations available, so we can automate a lot of tasks. Microsoft Defender for Cloud Apps helps us stay compliant. It has predefined mechanisms in place to prevent attacks. For example, if an external user tries to access our SharePoint folders or files, an attack will be blocked. This is why it is important to give appropriate access to guest users. Microsoft Defender for Cloud Apps has many features and benefits. It provides a number of policies that can be configured to meet the specific needs of our security team. These policies can be used to customize cloud applications so that only authorized users can access them and perform operations that benefit the organization. In terms of safety and security, Microsoft Defender for Cloud Apps is top-notch. Using the solution's automation features, we can suppress false positive alerts. We can also close alerts, lower their severity from "high" to "low" or "informational," or close them immediately with the appropriate commands. This will depend on the configuration automation rule and the perspective from which we are testing. Microsoft Defender for Cloud Apps provides a single console. We are also provided with Microsoft templates to enable workbooks instantly. Alternatively, we can build our own customized workbooks to provide better insights and improve our SOC efficiency and overall performance. Consolidating all of our security data into one dashboard has saved our security operations team a significant amount of time. From an analyst's perspective, it is now much easier to correlate events, investigate alerts, and visualize specific entities. For example, an analyst can quickly see all of the alerts associated with a particular IP address, or they can view all of the activity for a specific entity over the past 24 hours or 7 days. This level of detail and insight would not be possible if our data were siloed in multiple dashboards. The single dashboard saves our operations approximately 20 hours per week by eliminating the need to access multiple consoles and tabs. Microsoft Defender for Cloud Apps threat intelligence can help us prepare for potential threats before they happen. However, it depends on how we develop the policies for the database to block or ignore things in our environment.
ShanavasVK - PeerSpot reviewer
Helps maintain a consistent posture of internet security while getting rid of VPN and hovering into zero trust
There could be a better way for the tool to categorize the traffic. For example, the tool does exceptions and everything overall. If I want to give guest access or provide access to guest users or any other internet access and if it does not go through the SSL inspection because, in our company, we can't have the root certificate on a device that we don't manage, which can be called out as an exception or an exclusion, but that doesn't provide a proper reflection of the picture of what is happening in the environment. There are granularities bringing it down. The tool I used or still have is Zscaler Cloud Connector to protect the cloud environment, which can have a bit more user-friendly installation and setup, and it would help a lot. The deployment process of Zscaler Cloud Connector needs to be more user-friendly. Improvements are required in the exception category. For example, suppose I report on a monthly basis what the breaches and traffic violating the SSL inspection area are coming from. In that case, I may find that half of them may be coming through some guest network, meaning the tool doesn't differentiate between the guest or normal networks or the corporate networks. Having options to differentiate different networks would be ideal so that it can show a true picture of things to users, as half of the things in the tool are not in our control and are not of our concern.
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Top Industries

By visitors reading reviews
Educational Organization
24%
Computer Software Company
17%
Financial Services Firm
8%
Manufacturing Company
7%
Computer Software Company
16%
Financial Services Firm
12%
Manufacturing Company
9%
Government
8%
Educational Organization
25%
Computer Software Company
13%
Financial Services Firm
8%
Manufacturing Company
8%
 

Company Size

By reviewers
Large Enterprise
Midsize Enterprise
Small Business
 

Questions from the Community

Which is the better security solution - Cisco Umbrella or Zscaler?
Cisco Umbrella and Zscaler Internet Access are two broad-spectrum Internet security solutions that I have tried. Zs...
Which is the better security solution - Cisco Umbrella or Microsoft Cloud App Security?
Cisco Umbrella is an integral component of the Cisco SASE architecture. It integrates security in a single, cloud-nat...
What do you like most about Cisco Umbrella?
Cisco Umbrella is easy to monitor, manage, and deploy.
What do you like most about Microsoft Cloud App Security?
It does a great job of monitoring and maintaining a security baseline. For us, that is a key element. The notificatio...
What is your experience regarding pricing and costs for Microsoft Cloud App Security?
I'm familiar with the licensing requirements to get our job done, but not from a pricing standpoint. That is not my job.
What needs improvement with Microsoft Cloud App Security?
We are having trouble with our continuous reporting configuration and struggling with configuring the collector prope...
Which is better, Zscaler internet access or Netsckope CASB?
We researched Netskope but ultimately chose Zscaler. Netskope is a cloud access security broker that helps identify ...
What is your experience regarding pricing and costs for Zscaler Internet Access?
Although Zscaler Internet Access is recognized as an expensive solution, with a cost-effectiveness rating of seven ou...
 

Also Known As

OpenDNS
MS Cloud App Security, Microsoft Cloud App Security
ZIA
 

Overview

 

Sample Customers

Chart Industries, City of Aspen, Eastern Mountain Sports, FLEXcon, George Washington University, Jackson Municipal Airport Authority, Ohio Public Library Information Network, PTC, Richland Community College, Smart Motors, Tulane University, VeriClaim
Customers for Microsoft Defender for Cloud Apps include Accenture, St. Luke’s University Health Network, Ansell, and Nakilat.
Ulster-Greene ARC, BanRegio, HDFC, Ralcorp Holdings Inc., British American Tobacco, Med America Billing Services Inc., Lanco Group, Aquafil, Telefonica, Swisscom, Brigade Group
Find out what your peers are saying about Cisco, Infoblox, Palo Alto Networks and others in Domain Name System (DNS) Security. Updated: January 2025.
831,481 professionals have used our research since 2012.