Cisco Umbrella Reviews

Protection and security provided by using Umbrella are the two top areas that I looked at when considering. With three campuses, Umbrella has proven itself with the detection and blocking of malware, viruses, and preventing users from visiting malicious sites. We have two Umbrella virtual appliances at each campus, with two campuses using Hyper-V, and the primary data center running VMware. 

The reports have given us insight into what the Internet is being used for at all three campuses. They provide insight into internet usage and information helpful in creating QoS rules.

• My favorite feature is the command and control callback blocking. It provides protection from crypto attacks by blocking the connection back to the attacker's server giving an added layer of defense. 
• Policies make the work easier by providing appropriate filters for locations. 
• The interface is simple, easy to navigate and set up.

If the virtual appliances could also gather traffic bandwidth reports, that would be great. 

The customer support is exceptional. 

They have a wealth of articles in their knowledge base. This has given me the freedom to troubleshoot on my own time. 

Cisco Umbrella's interface is easy to use and the visibility of user activity is extremely useful. 

We are in trial mode and use it for a distributed national environment. It provides category and security coverage for endpoints regardless of their location. As a mobile-first workforce, Umbrella always provides DNS-based security, even if endpoints roam in unfriendly waters. 

It provides centralized, device-agnostic management of the Internet experience. It has the ability to quickly block new threats. 

• Holistic approach
• DNS fronts most traffic.
• Quick console
• Instant management across platform
• Reporting is simplistic.  

• It needs better integration with external threat feeds to improve scoring. 
• I would like it to automatically feed to the customer's SIEM. 

It needs a better price point. 

My customers would like to protect users in company and outside their companies.

Improves security through DNS visibility, which can block malware, phishing, C&C, etc.

It is easy to implement.

If I want to see which users access a website, I need an Active Directory registered on Umbrella's cloud.

No stability issues.

No scalability issues.

I would rate technical support as an eight out of 10.

We did not switch solutions. We just added an extra layer of defense.

The initial setup is straightforward.

The pricing is fair.

You can request an evaluation license.

No.

We needed the product to enable a whitelist-only browsing mode for certain computers for a client. After that was implemented, I was able to configure a virtual appliance (which became the DNS server) to connect to a local AD server and relate traffic to an AD user name. From there, we could track and monitor where users were going and perform web content filtering to prevent video streaming and certain social media sites. This in turn positively affected productivity.

I don’t remember the specific examples of data I was trying to filter out but it was related to ads being hosted by a CDN such as Akamai. Links and images were being hosted there for quicker localized delivery yet the users were not actually going to those sites. Due to that it was showing that those sites were being visited the most, which wasn’t the case.

There was a positive effect on productivity because we could track and confront the users that were frequently using social media or streaming video during the work day. They weren’t wasting as much time after OpenDNS was implemented.

It gave us new capabilities and made users accountable for their browsing while at work.

I would like to have the ability to prevent certain sites/data from showing on the reports. I have had this feature request open for a couple of years. It would be useful to have for filtering out unuseful data.

I have been using this solution for the past two years. I previously used the free solution 6-8 years ago.

I did not encounter any issues with deployment, stability or scalability. I had a Sales Engineer assist with the setup for one portion, but was able to figure out the rest with no issues.

No

Excellent

Excellent, their Sales Engineer was very helping in getting the AD sync setup.

No

Initial setup was straightforward. Any questions I had were already answered on the forums.

A vendor team was only needed for one small portion, which was setting up the virtual appliance. I would recommend trying to figure out the setting on your own first before reaching out to support. I found it very simple.

We were able to resell the service for a 100-200% profit.

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.

It has the ability to block malware threats in the cloud and control web content access from inside or outside the office.

It has significantly reduced the threat of virus/malware infections, CryptoLocker infections and has made our client’s networks more secure.

Improvement could be made in the area of detailed reporting analytics broken down by client name for individual custom reporting.

I have been using it for about three years.

I have not encountered any deployment, stability or scalability issues. The installer can be scheduled and rolled out using our set of Managed Services tools.

Customer service and technical support is excellent. I give it a 9.5.

We have used Websense, Barracuda and iPrism in the past. The flexibility of OpenDNS supporting a high-performance cloud infrastructure and not requiring any hardware or software cost was a major factor. The monthly pricing model fits into our company’s core services as a Managed Services provider and eliminates the need for annual renewal licenses.

Initial setup was straightforward for the most part, but it can become complex depending on the granular content filtering features that need to be implemented for each client.

In-house implementation. I would recommend an automated procedure on a domain network instead of a manual remote install. I recommend a default of blocking malware, phishing and pornography only, and allowing the client to determine if any additional categories need to be blocked on their network.

ROI benefits both the reseller and the client in Managed Services because of its proactive approach to network security. Our technicians aren’t spending hours of wasted time removing malware and viruses from desktops and notebooks. Customers appreciate the productive benefit of multi-layered protection that builds upon their legacy firewall and spam prevention. The pricing for the subscription is minimal (literally a few cents a day). The price is based on content management and security of client networks, as a bundled solution with an existing service.

Try it before you buy it, to test it out. Test the content filtering categories.

Custom whitelist/blacklist/block page allows us as consultants to tune web content filtering for the SMB market.

OpenDNS supplements other security solutions to allow for blocking through DNS requests, which is common for malware to use to bypass other security mechanisms.

This product needs policy scheduling for enforcement by category. Notice in all the packages, there’s no scheduling. In the Insights or Platform package offerings, you can now essentially have multiple ‘policies’ per AD user or network group. What’s missing is that I still can’t set enforcement to block certain website use at this time of day or these days of the week. For instance, a company may allow streaming audio sites for music only for night shift workers to help them keep awake and versus dayshift workers.

I have been using the web-based, small-teams edition since 2007 (nine years).

We have never encountered issues with general deployment.

We would rate customer service and tech support after the Cisco acquisition a 5 out of 10.

We’ve used and deployed ZScaler, Websense, and other UTM-based blocking solutions. This product is not always the best if you need complex policy and scheduling, and other user soft-pass through authentication.

Initial OpenDNS setup is straightforward if you have a static IP address and you apply the DNS forwarders appropriately. This is literally a five-minute-or-less change.

We always implement for ourselves and for others in-house because of ease of use. Implementation-wise, companies should be aware that changing DNS forwarders might impact their global DNS operational needs. OpenDNS servers are also slower than something like Google DNS.

Pricing needs to be reduced for SMB based on the blocking capabilities and the lack of other features that you just cannot do in DNS, such as authentication-based filtering.

Also, scalability-wise, the pricing is more of a challenge for enterprise-class environments because of the pricing model.

OpenDNS is either a good complement to your existing web content filtering solution at the enterprise level, or it is a good free or easy-to-deploy alternative for home and SMB use.

It transparently protects users from rogue web sites.

OpenDNS filters DNS query/reply without any software to be installed on the client side, so in my mind, the transparency I was talking about relates to:

• No changes on the client side required, i.e. software or configuration changes
• The complete communication is not proxy’ed as such, only DNS query/response filtered.

It provides native integration into the multiple cloud services, for example, Microsoft OMS.

I used it during a two-week POC (proof of concept).

I have not encountered any deployment, stability or scalability issues.

Technical support is good.

This is the first time we used one of these products, one of the known DNS firewalls.

Initial setup is simple, although some pre-requisites were not communicated to us, and they can make the final solution a bit more complicated.

We implemented it in-house with the support of the vendor.

The product has been rejected by business due to the pricing; no ROI as such.

It is a great product in the company security portfolio. It can be used together with the proxy to provide end-user security. However, the cost of this product is too high for what some businesses can afford.

The feature that most interested me was protection against DNS-based attacks. Umbrella offers protection against malicious websites by stopping users from visiting them. This is important because of its host / endpoint protection, an important concept as businesses decentralize their operations and employees find themselves working from unmanaged sites on untrusted networks.

Employees can do their jobs and know that they'll be protected from malicious websites.

The product itself is excellent. What I'd like to see improved is the purchasing process; specifically, I'd like to see OpenDNS offer its customers the ability to purchase any number of licenses instead of a bundle.

Cisco & Open DNS don't make it easy to add additional users/licenses to an existing account. Instead they want you to go to their store (can't get to it while you're logged into your Umbrella console) and do a purchase, like you're in some line at the grocery store.

I have been using it since April 2015.

Deployment is straightforward, the product and the back end systems that support it are stable and the product is scalable as long as the customer purchases the necessary number of licenses.

The purchasing process could be easier. What I'd like to see is the ability to contact a live person at OpenDNS and over the phone be able to purchase additional licenses.

Technical support is good.

Umbrella is the first product of its type that I've used. Otherwise, my company has relied upon anti-virus products to protect hosts.

Initial setup was straightforward. I simply downloaded the client, installed it on a host and that was it.

Implementation was straightforward and was done in-house.

Regarding ROI, that falls into the category of security and that is always a tough sell to management.

What I'd like to see improved is the purchasing process, specifically I'd like to see OpenDNS offer its customers the ability to any number of licenses instead of a bundle.

Plan, plan and plan some more.

Web content filtering: Cisco ASA 5505 doesn’t have a straight content filtering feature, so we used OpenDNS and it worked like a charm. It is security beyond the firewall, and hence more beneficial, as it stops the threats before reaching the firewall and enhances security.

We were able to implement web content filtering to block unwanted traffic, and to prevent bandwidth choking and malicious attacks without deploying any hardware/software, within a few hours.

I would like the product to offer more security features, such as IPS, IDS, DDoS prevention, etc.

I have been using it for six months.

I have not yet encountered any deployment, stability or scalability issues.

Implementation was straightforward with minimal changes to existing infrastructure.

It was self-implemented.

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

I highly recommend SMBs and enterprises use it to enhance their network security with minimal cost through the OpenDNS cloud solution.

Deployment and management are easy.

It made web filtering and malware protection easy.

I think there is some room for improvement with regard to the Windows client. While providing great protection for roaming laptops, on occasion users in the office would get the "yellow triangle" showing up over their wifi connection. It would state that the users were not connected to the internet, when in fact they were. This caused a few gripes and was difficult to troubleshoot. Other than that, not much else.

Only other suggestion might have been a URL to automate requests when checking if a blocked site is in fact a valid block.

I have been using it for two years.

Deployment and scaling are very easy. The only issue was as mentioned.

Technical support is excellent, with quick responses.

iPrism was inline, did not scale, and not easy to manage.

Initial setup was easy; just forward your DNS.

An in-house team implemented it; it was pretty straightforward. Just get the appropriate teams involved.

ROI was all about added security and a decrease in malware.

Pricing was fair.

Go for it; there is no better way to secure guest networks without any headaches.