We compared Cisco Umbrella and Versa Unified Secure Access Service Edge (SASE) Platform across several parameters based on our user's reviews. After reading the collected data, you can find our conclusion below:
The Versa Unified Secure Access Service Edge (SASE) Platform is preferred over Cisco Umbrella due to its comprehensive feature set, including firewall, VPN, and secure web gateway. Users highlight its ability to seamlessly integrate with existing networking infrastructures, as well as its superior performance and scalability. Versa SASE Platform offers advanced security analytics and AI-driven automation, ensuring better threat detection and mitigation capabilities compared to Cisco Umbrella.
"The most valuable features are the antivirus as a whole, the anti-malware, and all of the protection features that scan our enterprise devices."
"The solution is stable."
"On the outside, the main differentiation is because Lookout ingest. They have ingested basically all of the apps for the last ten years and all the versions of all the apps, and we have that in a corporate database that allows us to do very large-scale machine learning and analysis on that data set. That's not something that any of the competitors really have the capability to do because they don't have access to the data set. A lot of the apps you can no longer get them because that version of the app is five or six years old, and it just doesn't exist anywhere anymore, except within our infrastructure. So, the ability to have that very rich dataset and learn from that dataset is a real differentiator."
"The protection offered by the product is the most valuable feature. It detects vulnerabilities or traps on our users' phones and then prompts them to clean up their devices. Tools we used previously would only discover, which required us to gather information on the backend, so Lookout is a welcome upgrade."
"We like Cisco Umbrella because of DNS security. It's one step ahead of whatever we are using for regular web filtering. In that way, it's more secure than other web filtering products."
"Cisco Umbrella is absolutely stable."
"By using Cisco Umbrella, you are sure of inspecting all the traffic. Whenever the user machine is connected to your network, it is inspected. That's the best thing. It means you are sure that nothing is being exported or imported without your choice. That is the best feature."
"I like the DNS layer security."
"One valuable feature is definitely its simplicity in terms of deployment. It is very easy to integrate it into the environment without any heavy lifting. Users didn't notice that we implemented it. You can start with a very low monitoring mode and start observing what Cisco Umbrella sees."
"It blocks malicious DNS queries daily which is very beneficial."
"DNS protection, domain blocking, SIP component, and the Cisco Umbrella roaming client are the valuable features of Cisco Umbrella."
"The most valuable thing is how easy it is to deploy. We did it with 9,000 users at my last job, and it took a week to get to all the endpoints. Doing that without having to physically touch all those endpoints was very simple."
"The product has a dynamic VPN feature for SD-WAN."
"It's very powerful, especially for engineering teams."
"The division of Control Plane and Data Plane is most valuable. It can be deployed anywhere, and you can control it and configure it from anywhere. This is one of the good features of this solution."
"Our customers are very satisfied with this solution. They have not mentioned any areas for improvement."
"Versa is a good centralized solution, where you're setting up your infrastructure in a data center type thing."
"The granularity when it comes to configuration and security features are valuable."
"There are great security and ops features without the need for having a different box for security."
"The most valuable features are the main steering and the firewall. The security features and SD-WAN features are also quite good."
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"From the analysis that we've done, they do seem to be maybe a step behind in trying to enter the market with a new solution. But when they do pick up, they do come out with some good products."
"We just submitted an enhancement request reflecting the main area we want to see improvement in; the APIs. Currently, we're able to build dashboards, but it's somewhat backward because we use our MDM API to create them. Lookout should provide API to customers so we can query our data and use it in our cloud, and this is the only outstanding area for improvement with the product right now."
"Lookout was moving into the SSE space. And so their work on SecureWeb Gateway and SD-WAN is still sort of evolving."
"The stability depends on the service from where you access it. Because sometimes, the place you are in, you have Gateway. You don't have Gateway. The gateway is overutilized. At the end, you need to go through their gateways. And this is the key point here. You have a tracking point. If it's not well orchestrated, and it scales up as you add more to the existing team, you will suffer"
"Cisco Umbrella should add some more documentation on proxies."
"Actually, we recently switched over to Zscaler because it has more features and it's more scalable than Cisco Umbrella."
"Cisco Umbrella hasn't integrated customized reporting yet. With Cisco Secure Endpoint Hub, I can see a report on user downloads and set it up to constantly get an email alert. Based on my understanding, Cisco Umbrella can't do that. You can set it up with third parties, but it would be better if that were built into the platform."
"There are cheaper solutions in the market"
"The main issue that we have is with the final steps or the full integration and getting rid of Zscaler. The company still has to fall back to Zscaler when something in Umbrella is not working as expected, such as when we enable SSL inspection. When something is not working 100%, the company is falling back to Zscaler."
"If the virtual appliances could also gather traffic bandwidth reports, that would be great."
"It should have more integrations with multiple end user OEMs."
"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."
"The interface could be simpler."
"Another thing that should be improved in Versa are their firewall features."
"The stability of FlexVNF's controller and devices could be improved."
"The UTM features can be improved. It should offer better functionality."
"I heard about them for the first time just before I started working on Versa. They do have blogs for information, but they could publicize more about the documentation and architecture. It doesn't seem to have that much exposure, and they should work on their customer base more."
"There are limitations when you connect from multiple locations. It does not work as expected. If you have more than 400 users, then it will choke. It will not perform as expected."
"Certainly, there are areas that require enhancement, and the current focus is on improvements. Presently, I believe that the emphasis should be on enhancing user interface (UI) features, particularly over end devices. The issue arises when attempting to log in to Versa from other devices, as the UI is not device-specific. Consequently, guiding someone to log in to Versa antivirus becomes challenging. Despite the absence of issues on the website, the lack of a login scope impedes graphical representation of user data or databases. Since work databases support only a limited range of features, I recommend augmenting features for end devices to address these limitations."
"The solution lacks a mobile version where small, manageable platforms can be developed."
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Cisco Umbrella is ranked 2nd in Secure Access Service Edge (SASE) with 108 reviews while Versa Unified Secure Access Service Edge (SASE) Platform is ranked 13th in Secure Access Service Edge (SASE) with 20 reviews. Cisco Umbrella is rated 8.8, while Versa Unified Secure Access Service Edge (SASE) Platform is rated 8.0. The top reviewer of Cisco Umbrella writes "Protects endpoints wherever they are, always pushing people to the right locations to avoid malicious intent". On the other hand, the top reviewer of Versa Unified Secure Access Service Edge (SASE) Platform writes "A flexible, stable and scalable solution ". Cisco Umbrella is most compared with Zscaler Internet Access, Microsoft Defender for Cloud Apps, Prisma Access by Palo Alto Networks, Palo Alto Networks DNS Security and Infoblox Advanced DNS Protection, whereas Versa Unified Secure Access Service Edge (SASE) Platform is most compared with Cisco SD-WAN, Fortinet FortiGate, VMware SD-WAN, Cato SASE Cloud Platform and Meraki SD-WAN. See our Cisco Umbrella vs. Versa Unified Secure Access Service Edge (SASE) Platform report.
See our list of best Secure Access Service Edge (SASE) vendors.
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