We evaluated Zscaler as well. The difference between Zscaler and Umbrella was that Umbrella was a lot simpler to deploy and a lot easier to manage. Zscaler requires way more customization and it has some slightly different use cases than Umbrella. For us, Umbrella was more what we were looking for and generally easier for us to manage.

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.

One of the main reasons we chose to implement Umbrella over its competitors was due to its extensive global network footprint, which closely matched our own footprint at Cosentino. Additionally, Umbrella's user-friendly interface was preferred by our users over other solutions, making it a more appealing option overall.

I was onboarded to an environment where Cisco Umbrella was already running. I'm sure my predecessor evaluated other products during the same time, and then they decided to start and stick with Cisco Umbrella for the past six-plus years for its efficiency.

We looked around to see what was available. There were a lot of content filtering solutions available, but one of the things that Umbrella brings, in addition to content filtering, is that awareness of known threat sites. Their tie-in with Talos, Talos being that organization that does all that research and feeds that into Umbrella, means that we not only have known malware sites from six months ago, but we're getting feeds from Talos within hours.

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.

We didn't evaluate any other solution. We went for Cisco Umbrella because we already had Cisco AnyConnect. We just used the plugin, and it was very simple for us to deploy it.

We looked at Trend Micro, but that was several years ago.

At the time, we were using OpenDNS, and then OpenDNS went to Cisco Umbrella. Because we'd had such success with OpenDNS, we just stayed on with the product. So, I didn't evaluate any other products at that time.

We did not evaluate any other options. We invited Cisco to come in and do a demonstration, and it was so strong. I also come from a Cisco background of many years. In addition, the industry reviews rated them very well and we took that as our lead.

When they came in and showed us what they could do and how easy it was to monitor every one of our sites within a day, after we put in our external public addresses, it was a no-brainer. It was up and live by the next day, after just a few hours. It was easy to use and set up and we could use it like our internal proxies. We could manage the content and know what was going on and investigate things. We knew what sites people were going to. It was wonderful. Everything we needed was there. We didn't have to go any further, and we knew Cisco would have our back.

We're a Cisco partner, and we work with a lot of Cisco solutions. So, it was pretty easy for us to decide what we wanted to try and test. We didn't really do competitive selection and assessment, and it was pretty straightforward for us to go with Umbrella.

I've always worked with Cisco. I've been working with Cisco products for the last 20 years. We do have other products that we can sell for a lower price point, for example, but typically, I like using Cisco products.

We evaluated Prisma because we have Palo Alto firewalls, but it was more expensive and more difficult to set up.

Previously, we were not tracking roaming clients, which were changing networks every time. I was wondering if something was hitting the endpoints, because we wouldn't know. When Cisco Umbrella joined our network, it explored all our networks. This was really interesting and a key part of why we chose it.

We did not evaluate other options. Ultimately, we landed on Cisco because it is more user-friendly than its competitors. 

In my former company, we used Area 1 for DNS protection, not Umbrella. I knew OpenDNS before it became Umbrella. In fact, I used OpenDNS for my personal accounts. In my current company we evaluated Area 1, but in the end, we loved Cisco's support and that is one of the reasons we went with Umbrella. But, obviously, the features in Umbrella are pretty good.

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.

Other than Akamai, there weren't many providers available in India.

We did evaluate other options before choosing this solution. We selected this one because we were able to merge it into an ELA (Cisco Enterprise License Agreement), which was beneficial.

I didn't look at other options. I only tested Cisco Umbrella.

Other products were evaluated, but I was not part of that process and do not know which vendors were on the shortlist.

Zscaler has a local data center available, which is something that Cisco can't offer us at this time.

We have one vendor, and interoperability is not an issue when we use Cisco.

Due to past experience, I knew it would do what we needed and the website has an intuitive interface, so there was no reason to research alternatives.

We evaluated another solution but the Cisco Umbrella solution is much more compelling. It doesn't have the on-premises appliances or any restrictions for the user to connect through the corporate environment.

If the user is anywhere and the user is connecting to the internet, they will make a micro VPN through the cloud and it will connect to the VMs in our corporate environment automatically. It doesn't require any manual configuration nor does the user have to initiate anything on the PC.

The other solution has a touch button application, on the PC. If you click it, it will create a channel with the appliance in your HQ or your remote office and then you will be able to connect to the internet or you can resolve DNS with queries. 

As this solution was not flexible, the management chose not to go with it.

We compared Cisco Umbrella to other solutions including Zscaler and Palo Alto.

Integration is better with Cisco. Cisco Umbrella performed very well compared to Zscaler and other solutions.

No I did not.

We were choosing between pfSense and their packages versus. OpenDNS looked easier to setup, so we went for that first. Eventually, we moved to using pfSense’s SquidGuard, because it allows us to be more precise with filtering websites.

Depending on the needs of the client, we consider several solutions. I have worked with Symantec PGP, CyberArk, Cyberwatch, Skybox, and Fortinet.

No.

We have tried a Linux-based proxy server, but that was complex to manage and wasn’t foolproof.