Cisco Umbrella Reviews

Cisco has its own cloud that they manage Umbrella on. So Umbrella is not like any part of AWS or Azure or GPP. Our use case for Umbrella all depends on our customer's requirements. Cisco Umbrella has many packages to help address these requirements. The current package which we are working on incorporating more is Cisco Umbrella SIG, which is the Secure Internet Gateway. It has just been launched as part of Umbrella and we are currently exploring its capabilities and utility for our clients.  

There are a lot of use cases for Umbrella, and for us those use cases include the following:  

• One of the more important use cases for clients is using the product as a web proxy.  
  
• A second thing would be a situation where a customer wants to block access to an employee's personal email account and allow only corporate email accounts.  
  
• A third would be the cloud-delivered firewall. This would cover a situation where a customer would create a tunnel between their on-prem firewall to the Cisco Umbrella cloud. This would make it so that all the traffic is filtered by the Cisco Cloud Firewall.  
  
• We use it to support our MDM (Mobile Device Management) integration. Umbrella can be integrated with various MDM products, like AirWatch and MobileIron, and that category of products.  
  
• Umbrella supports family integrations. So we can search for information from AWS or Azure-based clouds and we can create family-based policies using Umbrella.  
  
• Umbrella provides support for some features of Kaspersky. For example, it can tell you what all apps are running on the endpoints and it can give you granular control over those apps.  

These are only a few of the use cases which I think are most important for us and our clients at this time when using Umbrella.  

The most valuable feature which I found in Umbrella is the segmentation of personal accounts from corporate accounts. In order to work with this, Umbrella has a feature where we add the ID of the customer's Gmail account or the Azure account. That ID is then used as a filter to separate access so that only corporate Gmail will be accessible and it can block personal accounts.  

The second very valuable feature is the web proxy part which is effective in determining if a feed may be malicious.  

Data reporting is something I would like to see improved.  

Cisco is currently rolling out data centers for this type of solution. Currently, they do not have data centers everywhere. For example, they do have one in Singapore but they do not have one in India. My clients are in India and they find an issue of slowness in the services from the Singapore data center. Cisco is working on building a data center in India to address the issue but information about the completion of that project are lacking details.  

In the next release of Cisco Umbrella, I would like to see a DLP solution. That could be a feature someone can addon. But it should be a real Data Leakage Prevention solution to more securely handle the data.  

I have been working with Umbrella for around three years now.  

This product is stable and it is very easy also to scale up.  

Usually, a product is really designed for small, medium, or big companies. I think Umbrella is good to serve any size customer. The range could start from 200 users and then you have an interface that can handle anywhere up to 5,000 to 6,000 users. I think anything is possible with Umbrella as far as scaling usage because of the package and licensing options.  

If you want to increase the number of users you just have to inform Cisco to tell them to increase the seat count on Umbrella. We can renew our licenses to be in compliance with the Cisco licensing policy.  

I had worked for Juniper support before and I worked for other tech support teams and I feel that Cisco's type of support is the best. The response time has been right on and then they isolate all of the issues. It is the best product support I have seen in a long time.  

The initial setup is very simple, you can set up Umbrella within two minutes I would say. You just have to point the DNS to Umbrella and that is it. So it is very easy to deploy and set up.  

Actually, I am from the research team. We make the solution requirements, then the product moves on to the process team. Once I have made a solution, then the product team takes care of rolling out the implementation.  

As this solution is a public cloud solution, there is very little maintenance which the customer has left to do. The setup is relatively easy and it is very good for the client.  

The licensing part for Umbrella is really flexible. If a customer purchases a thousand licenses, and if at any point the customer overshoots the available license count, Umbrella would not stop working for the additional users. Cisco would be informed that there is an attempt at overconsumption of the licenses and they would inform the customers that their license count has been increased. It will do this automatically. The customer can take action to renew those licenses. So it is flexible.  

There are three models for licensing. There is the Cisco Umbrella essential plan, then you have the advantage plan, and then they have the plan including SID. Every license comes with a different feature set.  

The advice that I would give someone looking at the Umbrella solution is that they can evaluate Umbrella because it is very easy to set up. You can get started discovering the product and do a little to check it out. They should make sure that all their use cases are covered by Umbrella.  

On a scale from one to ten (where one is the worst and ten is the best), I would rate Cisco Umbrella as somewhere between a seven-point-five to eight, personally. But I will give it a seven overall.  

I do not know what the latest version is that is currently installed, but it is cloud-based monitoring so it is one of the most recent versions.  

The primary use case is for endpoint users who are not working on our office premises. They are remote employees who are roaming so they are not within our protected zone. They can be vulnerabilities if they are browsing content and there is malware included on those web sites. Umbrella allows this kind of monitoring on remote devices and we can block those sites. We can also block applications which we would like not to allow to be running in the organization.  

With Umbrella our primary use is that we can monitor the endpoints for external devices. We will protect the users from malware phishing through email and the websites they are browsing. Umbrella is a solution for things like DNS (Domain Name System) protection, filtering, and security.  

I think the one feature we are using that Umbrella provides that is the most valuable feature is the DNS security. It is used to watch all the traffic which we are routing through the endpoint and organization firewalls. The users and devices are diverted by our secure gateway which scans each and every DNS request. It notifies us if it is not safe and allows those that are. It is like an alarm center application near our firewall.  

In the way we are using the solution it would be good for us if they would do some simplification of the analytics. They need to improve this feature so they have analytics to show the content of the user activity. I would like there to be some more analytics provided so that we can see the application routing and additional specific information. Those kinds of analytics can prove to be helpful in our security efforts. For me, this is the only thing that could be improved in Cisco Umbrella. They already have so many features that it is hard to imagine what else they can add.  

I have been using Cisco Umbrella for two years.  

Ever since we started using this product last year, it has been stable. If any service is down, we can see on the dashboard whether all of the resources are online or not. If something is down because we are working on it for some reason, something could happen then. But in two years, I did not find any issues due to the product becoming unstable on its own.  

Right now, we are working as a startup and we have 13 members of the team who are using the Cisco Umbrella. They are using it directly during business hours with configurations and analysis and other maintenance and access. It is the product's job to watch all the traffic routing to data points throughout the nine hours as it is routed to pass through the Cisco Umbrella.  

But whenever other users are trying to access the network — even in the non-business hours — if they are using their office laptop, all the traffic will be routed through DNS security. Umbrella is protection for the company devices from websites that may do something like data attacks on remote laptops. It handles all of these requests no matter how many concurrent users we have.  

We will be adding DNS to all the endpoints. For this, we will update the Cisco Umbrella DNS software for all our data points to watch all the traffic that is going through the EndPoints. It seems it will be very scalable.  

I have not contacted the technical support, but I had a discussion with the sales and diagnostic people. The technical issues are mostly something I resolve on my own by looking at the documentation. But once, when I wanted to implement some tool for a new solution, I contacted the sales team and they asked me some questions about what exactly it was that I wanted to accomplish. After I answered the questions in the meeting with them, we came up with the solution and the process and put it to work. So the sales team knows the product well.  

Previously, in another organization, we used OpenDNS. That product was purchased by Cisco to be used as their product under the name of Umbrella. So I did not switch the product really, but the name and my company have changed.   

The initial setup is a simple process. If you build on-premises, the deployment will take half-an-hour. If you build on the cloud it is like 10 minutes. it could be even less than 10 minutes. It is really fast. It will take five minutes to sync to the endpoint, to the cloud, and to collect the data. The syncing is what takes the time.  

I have gone through the documents for Cisco Umbrella. So I have been deploying the product myself without the help of a technician and we are doing the implementation on our own.  

The only maintenance we do is we need to update the latest version through our version management software. We just update the agents on the endpoints.  

Because it is a cloud product, Cisco uses subscription models for the pricing. There are three subscription plans for Umbrella. They have a standard plan and also an enterprise plan and another one. The different plans cover different features and options for different sized organizations. It gives you the option to compare the subscription plans and get the coverage that you need.  

My only real advice to people considering Umbrella is that I can recommend this solution. On a scale from one to ten where one is the worst and ten is the best, I can rate Cisco Umbrella as a nine-out-of-ten.  

We use Cisco Umbrella for web security and it's very good. It acts as web filtration combined with security and I am very supportive of it, especially with cybersecurity trending these days and the amount of malware and spyware out there. It's important for end-users to have some sort of protection when they're browsing the internet and this product does that. Before it lets you go, it filters and gives you the okay to move forward with the website you're looking for. A lot of customers tend to make typos when they're searching for websites, which then leads them to unknown websites that automatically download malware to their computer — now they're infected. That's why you need web security. 

We currently have about 1500 endpoints under Cisco Umbrella, but of course, we plan to increase our numbers. We offer Cisco Umbrella in our packages so whenever we get new customers on board, they get it. 

In the past, Cisco Umbrella has denied us access to secure websites. I haven't seen it lately, but they have blocked different legitimate websites. However, they have good tools that allow you to refresh and verify whether a website is legitimate or not. They have so many servers across the United States and even globally. I believe that it helps you to identify a website. 

In other words, the solution is good, we like it and we've been using it. We have a big customer of about 1,200 users and they're happy. The only thing I am not happy with is Cisco themselves. Not because of a technical or support issue, but because a division of Cisco poached one of my clients, stole them from me, which is completely unethical. When I talked to our account managers about it, they said there was nothing they could do about it because it was a different department. I said, "What do you mean different departments? This is my client and you guys went and provided them with a solution that I am already providing them?" So, that was a big deal for me. 

Also, I think Cisco Umbrella has an automatic push feature, which is the automated updating agent, but if I am wrong, they should get it.

I've been using Cisco Umbrella for roughly five years.

We have been using Cisco Umbrella for three years; it's very stable, reliable and does its job. We experience minor hiccups here and there, but it's nothing that our team cannot handle, and if for some reason they cannot, then they can always reach out to customer support.

Cisco Umbrella is very scalable. You can do anything and it's very useful for MSP. It's basically a single window that allows us to manage different servers and different clients. That's the beauty of it, no more logging in and out for different clients, which is nice.

For me personally, I consider Cisco to offer premier support. Currently, due to COVID-19, we cannot call them now for obvious reasons, but prior to COVID-19, Cisco support was one of the best, especially in regards to Umbrella. Honestly, we almost never have to contact them. I don't recall having to contact them even once over the last year or so.

For web filtration, we tried Websense before but now I believe the cloud solution is the way to go, it's much better. We had a customer and they needed to have different layers of protection, especially today with cybersecurity, and open DNS is one of them. I believe it's mandatory that you must have some sort of defense because it's is up in the air, there may be other solutions, but something needs to protect you from going to the wrong websites.

They have different setups. For example, you can integrate with the Cisco Firewall and I believe you can integrate with any platform with an agent, on each device. So, it really depends on how comfortable you feel with the setup. If you need to get more information and analytics, I believe it says the agent is the best way to go. The agent gives you every machine: for example, what has been blocked? What kind of security breaches have been attempted? Open DNS has defended this particular endpoint, but there are definitely many flexible, different integration methods to integrate a solution.

I am not sure, I don't have the numbers in front of me, but I think it's $1.00 or so per device/month.

I like this product and I'd really recommend it to everyone. Obviously, it's not the only product out there, but today, every endpoint should have multiple layers of security. You need to protect your users when they are browsing—open DNS. You need to protect them from emails, both inbound and outbound and you need to protect the endpoint from breaching. 

I would rate Cisco Umbrella a nine out of ten.

I am using it at home for my personal defense. We also use it in our company.

A lot of my stance, even before Covid, has been the assumption that people aren't in the office, and if you're going to have a mechanism, it has got to be there for the most vulnerable. The most vulnerable are those who are furthest outside our firewall. That's how I've always constructed my sort of security posture.

I tend to use Umbrella as one of my favorite solutions because it allows me to mitigate problems before they strike the firewall. It allows me to set policies that are effective whether people are on-premise or working from home. It is fully functional for its purpose. It is not a replacement for a firewall or antivirus. It gives you a nice skin on your onion that is pretty strong, and that's what I like about it. It mitigates things before I have to deal with them, and I can see those reports. It also stops people from going to different places.

Its simplicity is most valuable. I can install it and get it up and running, and it can be pervasive across my business within a business day.

It is pretty simple and straightforward to install and configure. Its remit is reasonably clearly defined. When you look at solutions like Darktrace and Carbon Black, the mission objective isn't as clearly defined. Cisco Umbrella, Sophos Central, or some of the other solutions have a more standardized approach to antivirus, which includes enhanced response from the machine learning or deep learning perspective.

The API is very Cisco orientated, which is absolutely fine if you're using Cisco Firepower and SecureX kind of products, but if you want to integrate with third parties, it is a bit tricky. There are some key API connectors for the more prevalent SIEM tools.

I would really like to see in Cisco Umbrella the ability to create customized reports and then assign the rights to view these reports to people within a group. I should be able to create a customized report, which is viewable by anybody who has the rights. I should be able to create groups within Cisco Umbrella, and then assign reports to groups and have those reports split out automatically only to those groups. I can kind of do it by restricting my email list, but it is a half-complete way of doing it.

I have been using this solution for probably 15 or 16 years.

It is fully functional for its purpose. 

I used to call them regularly. They're pretty good.

Its initial setup is very straightforward. It is a DNS redirect, so it takes literally about five minutes to configure it. The only thing that is tricky is going in and defining your policies, but that's what I call the evolution of the product. You start with simple monitoring, and then you refine it over time.

It has a reasonable price. It is certainly not as expensive as it used to be. It is in line with other offerings on the market.

There are a number of different flavors of Umbrella. They could bring Umbrella SIG down a bit because its price is a little bit high for what it does, but I also understand why its price is high.

I would advise having a clear idea of where you want your users to go, what do you want to do, and what do you want to restrict your users on. Have a clear point of view, and then look at it from the perspective of the role of the user within the organization. This is going to define your groups. You can then put users in groups, and then you've kind of related roles and groups, which makes management easier in the future.

I would rate Cisco Umbrella an eight out of ten. It is good and solid, but it is not perfect, so it is not a ten. There are areas of improvement, so it is not a nine.

We are using this solution for DNS filtering to try and make sure that users do not make ill-advised clicks and find themselves in harm's way. Once we started to implement it, we realized that just putting Cisco Umbrella appliances on the company's network was not good enough. The notebooks travel and the risk factor travels. We switched over and for some time now, we have deployed it predominantly on roaming clients.

In the current environment, it is a good thing we had deployed the Cisco Umbrella before people started to work from home because of COVID. The risk factors went up and the amount of thoughtfulness that people put into, "Is this a real message or is this phishing?" People became lax. If we did not have this solution, the number of clients that we would be dealing with attack issues would have mushroomed to a much higher level than we had to deal with. Umbrella has been a godsend for that.

The most valuable feature is the ability to block users from reaching places that they should not even try to reach has been a boon.

Once we were given a roaming client and we did not only have Umbrella servers filtering the traffic as it left the perimeter. They were giving us what we want and did not have to worry anymore, I was happy with the solution. I view it as a mature solution that delivers what we need.

One of the issues with Umbrella is as you get into endpoint detection and response, such as EDR point solutions, some of them will not integrate well with Umbrella. Sometimes when you want to use technology, such as Always On VPN, it will not work. There are some looming issues as one type of technology starts to crossover with Umbrella. That is the challenge and Umbrella should find a way to be more compatible with some of the endpoint response solutions that are coming out on the market.

I have been using this solution for a long time since it was OpenDNA which was before Cisco bought it.

There are no scalability problems with this solution. They do a good job of having updated servers around the world and at all hours of day.

One of the issues with Cisco technical support is that it is all linked to them having all of the maintenance contracts always running. If you work with a customer base where not everybody always renews their subscriptions and you need to get support but you did not sell the solution, it can make reaching the support a challenge. There is no problem with the quality of the support. However, sometimes Cisco's arcane rules regarding how they register and do tracking make it difficult for a managed service provider to get the support they need. 

We do not have a problem with getting support for Umbrella because we have a contract for that. It is trying to get support for all the various pieces of networking hardware that customers have not maintained properly difficult, Cisco is not easy to deal with in this regard. 

The initial setup is straightforward.

When talking about Cisco solutions in general there pricing model is horrible. For example, you can sell a Meraki-based solution, but if the customer starts shopping around, someone is going to have access to the pricing at a level that you cannot compete because they do not have uniform pricing. Not everybody gets fair pricing. Unless you are one of the real major corporations selling the solution your ability to compete is impossible. Cisco will acknowledge the situation and assure you next time it will be in your favor but it never becomes favorable for you. Cisco is not very good in this regard. However, Umbrella is good.

If you are not using some form of DNS filtering to guard against threats, you are not doing a good job on security in the current climate anymore. 

I rate Cisco Umbrella a nine out of ten.

The solution is similar to a web security appliance. However, it is like filtering on a cloud base, not on-premise. Basically, it is not fully mature, which means it's not yet ready to replace the WSA, however, over a period of time, it could to a certain extent. It's a cloud solution to protect against fake domain IDs. It can be your filtering solution and can also do a few other things with the other features on it.

I like that it's a cloud solution. 

The best part of Cisco is that Cisco has the second-largest security service cloud for security background checks. That is the big advantage of the Cisco security portfolio.

The solution is extremely stable. It has excellent performance.

The solution can scale if you need it to.

The initial setup is pretty straightforward.

The pricing is reasonable. You can negotiate contracts with Cisco.

Integration is very easy. It's not that complicated. Out of two clients, one had an easy integration, which was something new for me. That said, it did take time as it was the initial setup for me. 

There are always little items that can be fixed in any solution, however, I don't have any specific complaints.

The first time you set up the solution and have integrations, it may be a bit difficult, however, it gets easier.

The pricing could always be a little bit better.

I've been using the solution for about two to three years at this point.

I have been working with Cisco in general since 2013 or 2012. 

The solution is stable and reliable. There are no bugs or glitches. It doesn't crash or freeze. It's been very good so far.

We only have two clients on this solution. There's no more than that. There may be 200 users in total. One client had 150 users and the other had around 100 users. 

The product has three visions, it depends on what license you want, or the requirement, to be more precise. Whether you're from an adaptation center, or enterprise center, or utility center, it has different flavors for different kinds of customers.

Cisco's technical support has always been quite good. We're quite happy with the level of service they provide to clients.

One of our clients did use a different solution. We ended up replacing it with Cisco Umbrella.

The initial setup is not complex at all. It's a very straightforward installation. In terms of the deployment, it hardly will take more than an hour to two. At that point, it is up and running. A company shouldn't have any trouble with the initial setup. 

That said, security is always an ongoing process. It's a security product and therefore there's always work to do with it.

The solution has three types of licenses that cover a variety of different company types.

In terms of a commercial contract, it's about getting a discount, which you can arrange for the clients more often than not, so it's fine. It is not overly expensive.

That said, I have not pitched Cisco Umbrella for any clients for the last six to eight months. Due to COVID, I'm not getting a time or interest for doing any POC on this right now.

We are partners with Cisco.

I haven't done any POCs with this solution in the last 10 months or so, and I only have two clients on the product.

I would recommend the solution. I'd rate it at a seven out of ten overall. We've been mostly happy with the product.

We are using the most updated version, although I cannot definitively give the number. I believe it is 1.6. 

I like the original functionality, which allows for providing secure DNS services. To define that, one's users can be on-net or off-net. This can be either in one's office or a remote location. This is the functionality that I find to be most prevalent in the area. 

While the way the solution works with the functions is fantastic, updates or the ability to secure the vault while offline for cloud-based services should be addressed. 

The integration with Cisco could be better. We already have something along these lines and so far so good. 

Local support should also be provided, so that there will not be a need to lump us in with the European pool. For other products, Cisco does have local support. There is a local number which can be reached should the need arise. The support should be more regionalized, as we are talking about an endpoint to endpoint solution. Owing to the number of people who interface with the tool and the response time, local support should be provided. The local support job should handle the app of Cisco Meraki.

I have been using Cisco Umbrella for over a year. 

Cisco Talks is just about the best technical assistance center in the world. I have no complaints or issues with it.

In the past I worked with Checkpoint Harmony, which is a similar tool that provides a certain level of endpoint support to users and a measure of coverage.

I like the responsiveness of the technical assistance center of Cisco Talks. As such, I will always go with Cisco. It was thanks to the technical assistance center that I went with Checkpoint Harmony on one occasion.

For organizations in which I have been involved, I start off easy and then proceed to compliant, since there is a need to ensure that one does not overly complicate his work. The deployment for each person is generally very difficult. We start with easy, at which point we are encouraged to have a good grasp of the technology, without which the entire environment will be locked down and nobody will be able to do anything. As such, I start with easy and migrate the customers to compliant over time. 

Each environment has two people who are responsible for deployment. 

In the region I'm from, that of EMAR, Europe, the Middle East, Eastern Asia and Africa, our organizations do not have many liquid cash assets, so the price could be better. 

We use the solution both internally and externally, as the company for which I work, Signal Alliance, is a systems integrator. 

One should keep an open mind when it comes to using the solution, start off easy and then proceed to compliant. 

I rate Cisco Umbrella as a seven out of ten. 

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.

Easy to deploy.

Efficient protection on the DNS level and even higher. The sandboxing feature analyse and handle the complicated security risks.

The product can be pretty expensive.

I've been using the solution for two to three years at this point.

We haven't faced any issues. There aren't bugs or glitches. It doesn't crash or freeze. We find Cisco to be reliable.

We have a variety of customers. The number of users on each umbrella varies from one to a few thousand. Most companies may just have a few hundred users. It's basically suitable for companies of all sizes. It scales well, in that sense. 

The Cisco Umbrella IT operation resource needs are equal for a large and small company. (no need to hire more engineers or operators)

Overall, the scalability is excellent. It's quite flexible.

While I have been in touch with Cisco technical support in the past (and they've been quite good), for Umbrella, I find I don't need any support.

I've dealt with other products on a different scale. I'd say that Cisco Umbrella is far and away much better than the other cloud security products on the market.

The initial setup was not complex. It was pretty straightforward. We found it to be rather easy, from beginning to end.

The deployment times vary and depend on which Umbrella you use. However, we've found it should only take about a day to get up and running. An IT team can manage it. They don't necessarily need an integrator.

The solution doesn't really require too much maintenance. You probably wouldn't need a dedicated person to maintain it.

We are integrators ourselves, however, the initial setup is so straightforward, typically an in-house IT team can manage a setup.

The solution is costly. It doesn't come cheap. The licensing also comes with additional costs for extra services (such as sandboxing feature, L3/L4 firewall, etc...).

We are Cisco partners. We have a business relationship with them.

We use various types of Umbrella. 

I'd recommend the solution. It's one of the best on the market and it works well in different environments. It's also extremely easy to deploy.

Overall, on a scale from one to ten, I'd rate it at a nine.