Cisco Umbrella Reviews

With Cisco Umbrella, our clients usually always start with simple needs such as URL filtering and move to providing a consistent experience whether the employees are at home or in the office. We also have clients with a large Cisco Meraki portfolio. Umbrella ties into Cisco Meraki. You can log into one place, configure your policies for your users when they're away from home, but then those policies can be pushed down to the Meraki deployments. So if you've got 100 branch offices, which some of our clients do, it's one click to edit a policy and have it be effective in all of the branches. It will also be effective for the home users. Through a single pane of glass, you can have a consistent policy everywhere. This comes down to the integration that Cisco has built into the different products.

Cisco Umbrella's integration with other solutions has been a great feature in terms of ease of administration. Administration and troubleshooting are faster. The single pane of glass is great as well. Another great feature of Cisco Umbrella is remote browser isolation. With this feature, you open a virtual browser, and it's seamless to the user. If the user ends up going to a bad website that's passed a policy and something bad tries to download, it will not download into the machine because it is a virtual window somewhere in the cloud. You are protected by this feature.

The integration between Cisco Secure products is a lot better now than it used to be, especially with Cisco SecureX knitting everything together. Previously, they were solutions on their own with a single dashboard, and it made troubleshooting difficult. You may have contained a threat from one place but not in another place. Cisco has worked hard over the last three or four years to allow these products to inter-operate, which makes troubleshooting and finding threats a lot faster.

The benefit we have seen from using the Cisco Secure suite is the threat response. When you have a product on its own, there might be a threat, and you can click a button, deal with it, and think it's done, but you would have to rely on someone to go and check the other products. With integration, you don't have to do that. You can log into a single dashboard like SecureX, which fits everything together. Even Umbrella ties in with Meraki, Cisco Secure Firewall, and Endpoint. Thus, you can be quite confident that if you contain the threat in one place that it's automatically contained in other places as well.

Threat hunting with Cisco Secure is easy with Cisco Threat Response and SecureX. When the suite of products are tied in with SecureX, you can then dive into one dashboard when there is an alert. With a couple of clicks, it will launch Cisco Threat Response. You will be able to stop the threat at the endpoint or firewall and also see what other devices are potentially compromised. If it's bad software, you can make sure that if it's detected again that it's never allowed into your network. The client that's compromised can be shut off completely. Before integration, you either wouldn't have been able to do that or it would've been a long-winded process. Then, the damage might have already been done because the threat response came too late. Integration has enabled faster threat responses.

I would like to see more integrations with more products. Some of the integrations need to be simpler as well. For example, the integration with Cisco Secure Firewall could be simpler.

It would be good to make reporting simpler. For those who don't use SecureX, it would be good to make Umbrella really simple to use upfront. It's not a difficult product, but it can be daunting for someone who isn't exposed to it because there are so many options.

We've been using Cisco Secure products for 20 years, and we've been offering Cisco Umbrella since its inception.

We use several Cisco Secure solutions including Firewall, Analytics, Umbrella, Endpoint, and Client.

As an intermediary between Cisco and our customers, the value we add is not only the experience but also the relationships we hold within Cisco. We may know the answer to a customer's question because of our experience. If we don't, our relationship within Cisco is such that we can go straight to the person we need to ask. It shortens the process, and we can deliver the solution faster than the customer going directly to Cisco.

Cisco Umbrella's stability and availability have been 100% uptime since inception. This stat has never gone down.

Because Umbrella is a cloud-based solution, it doesn't matter if you are putting five users through it or 5,000. All of the heavy work of processing is done on Cisco's cloud platform, and it'll always give you 100% uptime.

Deploying Umbrella is really easy. The initial deployment can be done in one to two days. More advanced deployment including creating policies is also quick and can take a few hours to two days because it is cloud-based.

You don't always have to deploy Umbrella live straightaway. Umbrella can be deployed in monitor or audit mode so you can see what's going. You can then use the data to create the policies. That is, you can deploy it without affecting anyone initially just for the visibility and then build policies on the back of it.

Testing is easy as well, which means that you can test the data you've gathered on a small set of pilot users.

To those thinking about Cisco Umbrella, my advice would be to take up the free trial. It takes just a few clicks to deploy it in monitor mode, and you won't be affecting live traffic or your user base. You will be able to see the level of data you get of what all your endpoints are doing.

Given where Umbrella is today and the benefits it offers, especially compared to the competition, I would rate it a nine out of ten.

Our partnership with Cisco is very positive, from our account management team to the systems and sales engineers, to TAC for support. This is because Cisco has a knack for getting us in front of the right person, which is so useful. Other vendors aren't always as good. With Cisco, if you say you need someone who's an expert in deploying Umbrella or Meraki, they'll get you that expert. And no matter what question you throw at them, they'll have the answer. If someone says they're going to get you an answer, they do. That's the power of the partnership with Cisco. They're sort of a trusted partner. 

The benefits we get from partnering with Cisco are first of all access to Cisco's expertise to deploy these products. This means we get to know about the products in a bit greater detail than we would of if we weren't a partner. By knowing about the products in greater detail, we can then offer them to clients. 

Being partners, you get partner benefits, discounts, and the like. But it's more the knowledge. If we know the products on a deeper level, we can offer them to a client. We can show the client the value add of Umbrella versus a competitor's product.

The benefit that Cisco gets from Vohkus being a trusted partner, is that they know when we deliver a solution, we deliver it right. We deliver it to a standard that Cisco would be happy with. Cisco benefits from this partnership as they get fewer TAC calls because if we've deployed it correctly, the customer won't have to speak with them. Equally, if we've deployed it correctly, we don't have to go speak to them, so we're cutting down on costs, but there is also the brand reputation that's being maintained. If we deployed a Cisco solution and did it badly, it'll look bad on us, but the client will think it could be the Cisco product. By us deploying it correctly with our experience and knowledge, Cisco would know that that solution's going in and the customer isn't going to think, "Oh, it's Cisco that's the problem," if something goes wrong. That brand integrity is maintained.

We use Umbrella to front-end all of our DNS requests and that way they protect any of our end-users from going to any kind of malicious site. It doesn't matter if they're in-house in one of our locations, or if they're remote and working from home. That was the biggest part was the fact that we could protect our end-users, even when they're not in the office.

We were actually trying to solve other challenges, which included just to protect the onsite, but once COVID hit, it pretty much made it a very easy transition for us. At one point, when COVID was at its highest peak, we had everyone working remotely. We didn't have to worry about how we were going to restrict our access on the internet, because Umbrella was already handling that for us.

It made us more secure, which is a very important thing for a financial institution.

The support for hybrid work was the biggest thing. It protects our users, whether they're in the office or they're out of the office. We get the same policy in both locations. We can assign policies based on individual group memberships and it travels with them no matter where they go. It helps no matter where they are.

Since it's based on user DNS requests, it's right from the endpoint all the way through the network to be able to identify those locations and restrict access if necessary. It's not just the malware sites, which is very important, but it's also just content in general. There are business reasons for restricting access to certain content.

Since we implemented Umbrella, we are seeing a fairly significant amount of threats being blocked. A good 20 percent of all the activity, on average, that we see is actually being blocked by Umbrella, because it's either violating policy or it's some kind of malware.

Both monitoring the activity, so that we can investigate anything that may pop up, and the ability to restrict the access, or filter out what content end-users can view or go to [are valuable features of Umbrella]. Also, the fact that it blocks them from any known malicious locations.

It works really well and the best part about it is the fact that it's transparent to the users until they try to go somewhere that's either restricted because of content or restricted because of the fact that it's malicious. Then they simply get a popup and that's all there is to it. So from their perspective, it's very easy. They don't have to do anything in order for it to work.

There is a single portal that we go to that handles being able to set up policy, look at activity, or even manually add sites that we think that we want to restrict, even if it's not considered a particular category or a particular malware. The single-pane-of-glass management is very important. We have a very small team. We can't spend a lot of time going from product to product to product to either investigate or set up policy. We need to have one place that we can go to and set everything up.

It's really easy. It's an easy portal to go to, it's cloud-based, so we can get to it from anywhere. The ability to set up the policy is pretty straightforward. There are a lot of tie-ins with other products, like SecureX and other things, that make it just as easy.

It's cloud-based, so as long as you can get to the cloud, you're golden.

The only thing I can think of is that I'd like to see a little more flexibility in policy creation. The way that policy is currently structured is like a "first hit succeeds" kind of policy. It would be nice if it were more hierarchical.

I have been using Cisco Umbrella for about four years now.

It's been extremely stable. In the last four years, I do not recall a single outage. There has been nothing that I can think of that actually affected the performance of the system at all in the last four years.

We've never had an issue with scale. We've scaled it up to every user that we have in-house. When we deployed the gateways, we deployed two for HA purposes, but from a scale perspective, it's DNS queries. It doesn't take much. Our whole organization is on it.

Support for Umbrella is very good. There's a way to contact them directly from within the portal and we use that periodically.

I give them about a nine out of 10. There are issues with Cisco's tech support, like all the rest of them.

Positive

Umbrella was actually the first [solution we used in this area]. Once we discovered that that was a big hole we had—we didn't have anything that was controlling content for our internal end-users—we could run into problems with regulation, problems with compliance. It could run into issues with HR, as well as security issues associated with malware. We knew it was a hole, that we were missing. Umbrella filled that hole for us.

There were two pieces of the deployment. One was the cloud deployment, which got us set up in the cloud to begin with. We also had gateways that were installed on-prem, in-house.

We were able to get the gateways up and running in about an hour. The cloud deployment was all done by the Umbrella organization on the back-end side. To deploy to the end users, all we needed to do is set up a policy that said, "This is what you use for DNS." Once that was set up, we were done. Deploying that was done in a group policy and that group policy was pushed in a matter of minutes. The entire solution was probably deployed in just a few hours.

We did it all ourselves. Cisco handled the back-end side with the portal itself, but the rest of it, we did ourselves.

I think we got our return on investment within the first month of its use, because of the increased security that we had in the organization; the ability to have a product that is protecting our end-users. We do educate our end users today, but Umbrella doesn't require us to go through as in-depth an education process to say, "Okay, you're going to have to do the research. You're going to have to figure out what sites are bad. You're going to have to figure out where not to go." We don't have to do any of that. That's all handled by Umbrella. We just need to let them know that we're protecting them on the back-end side.

Its value exceeds its pricing.

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.

The impact on our employees' morale has been good. Anytime the employees understand that we're doing something from a technology standpoint to secure the organization more, that makes them happy. It's something that they don't have to concern themselves with as much and it improves morale quite a bit.

Resilience in cyber security is extremely important. We're a financial institution, so cyber security is very high on our organizational goals, all the time. Making sure that cyber security is resilient against any of the latest attacks that are coming out is extremely important. It's a constant thing. Cyber attacks are increasing every single year. The methods that are being used are increasing every single year. If something were to happen, not only would we have a financial impact, but we have a reputational impact. For a financial institution, a reputational impact could be just as devastating as a financial one.

Umbrella helps us with that overall security. It gives one less attack vector for the bad guys to get into. We're protecting those end-user devices and we're protecting those end-users from going to places that could be malicious. The fact that it's doing that for those end-users increases our overall security without us having to rely specifically on end-user education in that particular attack vector.

For leaders who are looking to increase resilience within their organizations, I would say that what is necessary is to do as much security, in-depth, as you can. That includes using Umbrella to protect your users and using lots of other security products and being able to secure every aspect of your organization.

I would rate Umbrella absolutely a 10 out of 10. It's literally a lifesaver when it comes to being able to protect our endpoints.

We're using that solution to essentially sort DNS attacks. We also use it to add that increased layer of protection at the DNS level for our customers. That's what we're using it for right now. We're trying to cut back on cyberattacks, malware, phishing, man and control callbacks, et cetera.

We had a fairly large DNS attack and that made us realize we needed basic DNS protection in place, however, we wanted something that was a little more advanced. That really pushed us over the edge for that enhanced DNS protection. It's got that ease of installation and billing along with just being a great product that's been tried and tested. That made our decision.

When we had that DNS attack, we saw a huge spike in issues. It's definitely gone down by a fair amount since implementation. We're seeing 800 fewer trouble tickets compared to the previous year. We can see (via the dashboard now) that we have billions of threats coming in every day. We're adding that extra layer of security for our customers. We're breathing a little easier now as it's actively protecting against all these threats that are coming in every day.

It helps us lead processes and blocks malicious DNS queries daily, which is very beneficial. We've seen a reduction of about eight hundred trouble tickets compared to the previous year. The customers are having a better overall experience as less bandwidth is being taken up by DNS acres. We're not having to constantly police that part of our network. It's a little bit of a better process and a better experience for our customers. 

We use the Easy Connect product, which works well.

The solution enables you to extend data protection to devices and remote users or distribute the locations. However, most of our use for the product is at the DNS level for our entire network and not really at the device level. We do have another added layer from a different company for the device security component.

The solution is pretty flexible.  

With the reduction of trouble tickets, it would be reasonable to say the solution has saved us money on security operations. 

Umbrella discovers new vulnerabilities every year. That's absolutely important to us. As our technology changes, the way we're attacked changes and will continue to change. It's important for us to be made aware of new threats and protect against them. 

The pricing could be improved.

I've been using it for almost a year, since February 2023.

I did not previously use another solution to this extent. 

We've seen an ROI with our trouble ticket call volumes going down. We've saved an estimated $30,000 so far this year.

Start working with your rep early and budget well in advance. Billing is fairly straightforward, but can be expensive.

We're customers and end-users.

We do not plan to purchase any additional security solutions in our environment in the near future. We have other layers of products in place already. 

For someone who's researching threat detection and prevention solutions, I'd have them consider Cisco Umbrella. You can see the threats that are being blocked, and you can help customers understand that you're doing everything you can to make sure that their online experience is safe and protected. People are working from home. People are doing telemedicine. There's a lot of more sensitive information being shared online. That in and of itself is a good selling point. You want to make sure that your customers are as protected as possible.

I'd rate the solution nine out of ten.

I am a Solutions Architect in a mining company, and the size of the company is around five to 10,000 employees.

We wanted to replace an existing solution and give a better experience to our users, and we wanted to have a superior solution that could give us insights into how secure our users are and what their browsing behaviors are to track down and narrow down issues. Of course, the first and foremost use case is protecting our users. Cisco Umbrella gave us all those things in one and having it integrated into our environment was a very seamless process, and we're very happy using it right now.

It gives you a single pane of glass to see what's going on with your environment and your DNS queries. It has consolidated a lot of previous efforts into the visibility of what's going on.

It saves time. You're protecting your users in a manner that you don't need to do anything after. If, for example, somebody tries to open a malicious website or tries to download something, it just won't allow that. That's it. Previously, there were loopholes and ways for users to get around the proxy, which gives you more work. In that sense, we're saving the support team's time. When you're investigating a problem, it quickly gives you insights into what you're looking for as simple as possible. You can see when a user was accessing a website, was it blocked or was it allowed? Of course, you could test connectivity for specific users and computers. That saves time in troubleshooting. It saves hours per week in comparison to the previous solution. 

The agent that gets installed on the endpoints or on people's laptops and devices is a Cisco AnyConnect Umbrella module. It's one of the most impressive things because you are able to protect your users anywhere they are.

Its reliability and the response time of the support team can be better. 

In terms of features, I know Cisco Umbrella has a lot of potential, and I'm not sure if we're using it to its full potential. I'm not aware of all the functionality, and for the functionality for which we're using it, it has been great. There probably is one place for improvement. We'll love to see any new features, new functionalities, and maybe better integration with other cloud platforms, but for us, it's good as it's now.

We've been using Cisco Umbrella for around four and a half years.

In terms of availability, we've seen it down a couple of times. It has become very stable recently, but we've seen it down. Maybe that's one area that they can improve on. It was not for a long time, but it caused a little panic among our users.

Scalability is happening with ease with Cisco Umbrella because you're either deploying another appliance in your branch office or another office, or you're pointing the endpoints to the existing appliances in your head office or any other place, and you're good to go. It's very scalable and easy to use, and you can have a new office ready in a day or less.

It's great. We've had some cases and issues, but they were resolved quickly and in a timely manner, and we're happy with it. I'd rate them an eight out of ten. They could be a little quicker, but technically, they're great.

Positive

The previous solution was a proxy solution. I'd not state the name of the solution, but it was a proxy solution. It was heavy. It was slow, and there was no easy way for tracking old things. And of course, you can't protect your users outside of the company environment.

I found it easy to implement. Cisco Umbrella has great documentation and great support teams, and implementing it was very easy for us. We just deployed the appliances, and we got through the initial basic policies. We were prepared to do it, so for us, it was very easy.

We did it ourselves. The documentation was good. We're experienced architects and network-oriented guys, so for us, it was just a great experience doing it.

The return on investment is in terms of time savings. It saves time and helps focus on other important things instead of digging into problems with users.

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.

Do your math and check the competitors, but in the end, you won't find a much better solution that's already integrated with your Cisco environment. If you are a Cisco company, that's the way to go.

I'd rate Cisco Umbrella an eight out of ten. 

It's for the VPN nomad connection. We capture all the DNS requests, log them, and check them in case of troubleshooting for security or malware issues.

Through Cisco Umbrella, we managed to deploy our M365 system and our connection. It was very good for deploying access to those cloud systems. It was a very important requirement to check all the connections from outside when the laptops are remote, and we managed to capture all the DNS requests. It was a security requirement.

It hasn't saved us time, but we managed to deploy the connectivity to the cloud system such as Azure or M365.

We can have a full overview and a quick overview of all the DNS requests. For us, it's quite important.

Cisco Umbrella is a good solution. It meets all of our needs. They can maybe simplify the configuration. For example, sometimes, the proxy part is quite difficult, and that's why we didn't deploy that.

We've been using it for two years.

We have no issues at the moment. It has been two years, and we did not have any issues. So, for us, it's quite good.

We have about 6,000 devices. So, I have no problem with scalability.

Their support is very good. We have a lot of feedback from our partners and our Cisco contacts. They get in touch to be sure that we are using the product correctly and whether we have any questions. I have had no problem with them. It's super good. I'd rate them a ten out of ten.

Positive

We didn't use any other solution previously. It's the first time we are using such a solution.

We were already using Cisco AnyConnect, and for us, it was a simple plugin. We didn't spend much time. We did some tests. We worked with a local French team, and after that, we deployed it. For us, it was very simple to deploy.

We deployed it ourselves with the help of a partner in France. The partner company is called Nomios, and we had a good experience with them. They know a lot of Cisco products, which is very good. They are into security and network architecture.

We haven't yet seen an ROI.

Its price for us is quite expensive because it's a subscription, and we just use it for the DNS log. So, for us, it's quite expensive.

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.

I'd rate Cisco Umbrella an eight out of ten. For me, it's quite a good product. 

In general, we use it for the security of our network.

We wanted to get an idea of what's happening outside of our network and what's coming to our network. We had no way to know before and we were just sitting there waiting for something to happen. At least now we can be proactive.

It has helped us to be more secure. Cisco Umbrella allows us to see threats in real time. We can also see if there are any bad actors inside of our network who are trying to do malicious things. It gives us a quick glance at the situation, at where we are and how vulnerable we are.

Another definite benefit is that it has helped us to remediate threats more quickly.

It's very important that the solution helps support hybrid work. In the past, we might have had one or two people who were working from home because of illness or pregnancy. Now, with 60 percent of our people working from home, Cisco Umbrella has really helped us out with threats that they might not even know exist on their side. We can monitor them and be proactive about them.

Also, if it didn't have a single pane of glass, we would not be using it. The single pane of glass gives you a one-stop shop. It's like going to Home Depot. You find all your stuff there. You can see all your threats and your endpoints. It's a very important feature and makes things very simple.

Another point is that it's very easy to maintain network connectivity.

I have been using Cisco Umbrella for about eight years.

The stability of Cisco Umbrella is very good.

I haven't had to scale it, but I would assume the scalability would be good.

We haven't contacted them from the time we were up and running.

We did not have a previous solution.

The deployment was straightforward.

I used an integrator, Harness LLC, and the experience with them was all good.

Our ROI is due to the level of threats that we don't have to deal with, threats that are being blocked by Cisco Umbrella.

There is room for improvement when it comes to the cost.

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

Look for programs that have a track record and that are proven. No matter what any individual might say, that person can't do it by themselves. They have to have support, and Cisco Umbrella is a good support.

Resilience in cyber security is like raising kids. You really can't stop. You have to be resilient continually. Every day is a different challenge. Just because you're good on Tuesday doesn't mean you're going to be good on Wednesday.
Cyber security resilience has been key for us, with people going home to work or to other places to do their jobs. That resilience keeps them working and keeps our network safe.

I love it. It's almost like trying to look at WiFi. You can't see the WiFi signal with your naked eye. It's the same with threats. You can't see them by just walking around the building. With a tool like Cisco Umbrella, you can see what you have and how to fix it.

For our employees, it means that their systems are working. They have no idea what we're doing behind the scenes to keep their systems working, unfortunately. I wish I could say, "Hey, guys, today Cisco Umbrella stopped 84 threats."

The most valuable features are the dashboard, visibility, and reporting capabilities. Our customers can see how much Umbrella is protecting their organization. If you don't know what you've got, you can't protect it. With Umbrella, we get visibility and see the protection that it's providing. We can get PDF reports on a weekly basis of any malware activities and any denial of service or command-and-control-type activities.

Cisco Umbrella is very simple to administer, and that's what our customers really like. They don't want the complexity that's normally associated with security.

Cisco Umbrella definitely reduced our clients' mean time to repair. It does what it says it does, and it does it effectively.

Cisco Talos is the secret sauce. It's the threat intelligence that feeds security solutions such as Cisco Umbrella. You can have a security solution, but if it is not backed by an organization like Talos and has not been fed, watered, and looked after, then it will be pointless.

Our clients have been able to consolidate applications and tools related to DLP, CASB, web proxy, and SSL decryption. These are natively built into the Umbrella platform. We're now on the cusp of looking at SASE and, maybe, migrating away from the traditional on-premises firewalls and merging more toward the cloud. In the future, as we start the transition to zero-trust network architecture as well as SASE it will certainly help our customers consolidate a lot of their existing tools.

The firewall capabilities could be better. Cisco is starting to introduce some layer 7 capabilities now, but there's still some room to grow. They should continue with the development of Umbrella so that it is a full-blown cloud-managed firewall solution.

We've been using and selling Cisco solutions since Cisco acquired OpenDNS.

We like to use technology first ourselves. It makes it easier to talk about it and sell it. Also, it's a good reference for customers to see that we actually use it internally. Umbrella has been a fantastic solution for us and our customers.

The initial deployment could take a couple of days depending on the deployment model. Cisco Umbrella could be up and running quickly. You can instantly point your DNS servers to use Umbrella's DNS as its recursive DNS, and immediately, you'll be protected by Umbrella. You can take it further and get more granular controls by using AD integration, which can take a little bit longer. From an engineering point of view, it's a very light touch, which is unusual for security solutions. They're normally pretty complex. Cisco Umbrella, however, is a simple but powerful solution.

Given that it's a cloud-delivered platform, Cisco takes care of the upgrades. It requires a pretty light touch in terms of maintenance.

I think Cisco Umbrella is priced well. We have a mix of customers with different verticals such as education. We have clients in the commercial space as well. Umbrella is at a good price point for all of our customers.

We choose to sell Cisco because it has done phenomenally well in terms of some of its acquisitions and the way they've integrated Umbrella. It could be a flagship security solution for Cisco. It's been a game-changer for us and has opened up new avenues and new revenue streams as well.

As a Cisco Secure reseller, we're able to articulate the benefits of the solution to the customer because we are a technically-led organization. We've got a lot of in-house skills within the cybersecurity space. We don't sell for the sake of selling. We want to provide the right solution, and Umbrella is absolutely the right solution as far as we're concerned. It is the leader, especially from a DNS level protection.

Cisco Umbrella is a phenomenal security solution. It's got the right balance between complexity and ease of use. Therefore, I would rate it at nine out of ten.

I had implemented Cisco Umbrella at a previous company. I'm now working at another company where I'm not using this solution. We've got another solution here.

The policy of the company was to make sure all outgoing traffic was sent through a filtering service, and OpenDNS, and then Cisco Umbrella, was chosen for that purpose. Once it was taken over by Cisco Umbrella, it had far more capacity and far more functionality written into it. 

In terms of the deployment model, I just used Cisco services. It would be through Cisco's private cloud. My site wasn't big enough. So, I didn't deploy the Cisco service on-premises. 

It was really valuable to me in protecting the outgoing data of the company. It was good for reporting. Every computer had the Cisco Umbrella program installed. So, I had good reporting on any issues related to outgoing data, such as whether there were any phishing or dodgy sites connected. It protected that part of the business.

A combination of Cisco ASA, Cisco Umbrella, and Cisco AMP connecting to the SecureX portal gave me all-around security for the site because they all reported into a central reporting server. If there were any issues, I could have got full details, even if a crypto locker attempt was made. I never had any security incidents that I'm aware of. So, it was a very effective tool.

It kept itself updated. So, I didn't have to worry about continuing to push out new installs of the program.

I felt safe, supported, and secure, and so did the owner of the company. It worked silently in the background, and no one else really knew it was working on their computers. When we went into lockdown with COVID, I was happy knowing that all the computers that left the business had the app installed and were going to be functioning securely. We got no viruses and no issues on any computer on the network, which is quite unusual. A lot of other people or a lot of other companies I spoke to reported that they had quite a few issues.

It worked 100% in terms of applying and maintaining network connectivity consistently across all workplaces. We never had any issues. The only issues we had were when sites might have been blocked because they were suspected of being within a filtering group. It would report back to the user and say, "This site is currently blocked by your administrator. Please click this button. An email will be sent to your administrator, and they can resolve the issue." I would then get the email, and I'd look at the site, and then I'd release it through whitelisting. It was very user-friendly in that regard.

It certainly helped to remediate threats more quickly because I was able to stay free of any virus outbreaks. It definitely locks out that part of the transmission where the virus will go out and attempt to download a package.

It worked silently and didn't use too many computer resources. It was really silent in its operation on the network. It had a really good impact on me. I'd love to put it in my new company, but we've gone down a different pathway. That's being resolved through Office 365 now, and I'm not proposing to change that technology.

I wanted to ensure that all outgoing traffic went through Cisco AMP servers. So, if we did get a crypto locking incident or any malicious sites that wanted to direct traffic to particular websites, they would be unable to do that because they would be blocked by the Cisco Umbrella DNS servers.

It also did website filtering for preventing access to porn sites and gambling sites. It had all other standard features. It had a good section where you could whitelist and blacklist websites.

I was able to implement it myself. It was really easy to install. You could install it on a server locally if you want to. If you have the biggest site, you would do that, but for my site, it was just directing all the traffic out through the Cisco Umbrella DNS. It was really handy. When the owners of the company went overseas, I knew that they would be secure because even if they were not on the company network, they would still go through the Cisco Umbrella servers. It was a complete solution for protecting the company with outgoing data.

The other useful feature was that if we were to get a malicious actor onto a server or service running somewhere, it would still have to go out through the Umbrella servers. So, it would more likely be blocked through there. It had multiple features that were super handy.

It had the ability to do a lot of app control. So, every single app that went through that portal was registered, but there is a general issue with the whole app control. As soon as you add a mobile phone to your network, all of the apps get registered through the system, and you can approve, reject, or just let them go through. When I looked at it, it was impossible to manage app control. There was just so much data. I didn't apply that service because I just didn't have the time to manage it. It would be good if there was a way to categorize applications. However, that's dangerous too because you can be turning off an app in a group because you don't know what it is doing. It could be a vital company app. So, App control is the main area in which they need to keep working.

Originally, Cisco Umbrella was called OpenDNS. I have used OpenDNS and Cisco Umbrella for about six years.

It is very stable. I never had any issue with it.

It is highly scalable. You don't even have to install it on your computers. You just change your DNS, and it'll start to work internally immediately. I never had any issues with performance or anything like that. I'm sure it would suit larger companies as well, but larger companies would install their own Umbrella service on their own systems and deal with the capacity that way. So, it is very scalable.

Their support is good. They always got back to me and answered issues. They showed me how to do my own debugging. They were always very professional and helpful. I would rate them a 10 out of 10.

Positive

We previously used proxy servers, but I wanted a more modern interface, and that's why I chose Umbrella.

It was super easy. I'm a general IT person, and I was able to deploy it. I read the documentation, changed some settings, changed the DNS on my servers, and then rolled it out to the team. It was a pain-free implementation.

I deployed it. It was pretty intuitive. I didn't have a consultant help me. I was able to implement the solution myself and manage it myself. That's a really good rating for an application. There are different systems you get to manage these days, and you can't have training on all of them. Because I rolled it out, I knew I rolled it out properly, and the system was working effectively. It was good. I liked using it.

The return on investment was that we kept the company secure. Nothing happened, which is the ultimate return on investment.

It was a little bit expensive on a per seat basis, but the company I was running was only a midsize Australian company, and it was a reasonable budget per computer for that system.

It started off being a free product, and then Cisco bought it, and it went to a reasonable price. I was using Cisco AMP as well. So, my per computer cost was reasonably high, but for a small company, it was within an acceptable level.

Not having reviewed other systems, I can't tell how they compare, but I know that when you do special security licensing with Microsoft, it is on par. So, it is probably standard within the industry.

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.

It is just another layer that you need to wrap around your company to keep it safe unless you could just shut off that possible attack vector from external parties.

To leaders who want to build more resilience within their organization, I would say that they've got to keep doing it, and they've got to keep working on it. I'm constantly looking for better ways to secure the company. Cisco Umbrella would be a very useful addition to their set of tools. 

A part of my plan in the long term was to implement the full suite. I never got around to that, but it was really good to know that I could go right down to app-level control. It was a very successful product, and I'd certainly recommend it to any business looking to just add another layer of security around their company.

In terms of providing a single pane of glass management, security does involve multiple systems, and I could log them all into the Cisco SecureX system. From there, I could get my single point where I could resolve issues with viruses, et cetera. So, in itself, it was a single pane of glass for DNS protection. It was fine, but I don't think there is ever going to be a single pane of glass anywhere. You're always going to have many different systems that you're using, but overall, it had a lot of features. It did the job it needed to do.

I would rate it a 9 out of 10. It is just app control that I want them to develop more.