Cisco Umbrella Reviews

We use Cisco Umbrella as a security layer for all our employees. We deployed it two years ago as a security solution in order to cover our roaming workforce. Our employees are scattered throughout more than 20 locations, including homes and hotspots, and we had to cover the security gap. We needed to be sure that regardless of the location our employees would be covered by the security features.

To provide connectivity to our members, we use Cisco Meraki. When our employees are within the co-working space, we use the integration with Cisco Umbrella security and the Meraki network.

The reports and notifications are the most useful part of the platform. As soon as you deploy the security layers, the reporting is very comprehensive. It helps you to have, at a glance, a clear view of what's going on.

The integration between Cisco Secure solutions is pretty good. We have been able to deliver the solution in a few days. The integration of Umbrella and Meraki is literally one click away from the customer.

One of the reasons why we chose Umbrella was its capability to perform end-to-end detection of malware and web traffic. In the last two years, we have been covered, detection has been faster, and we have been able to contain some potential threats along the way. We use the Umbrella stack from DNS protection to web and content protection. Our workforce is made up of 150 Macs; thus, we use Mac as a client. We have some PCs and integration with the network in our co-working spaces.

Utilizing Cisco Secure has helped us save time. Being a nimble organization, we don't have IT staff who are fully dedicated to security. The maintenance is also not very time-consuming. In terms of the amount of time saved, it would be half an FTE a year, given the fact that we are informed and notified when threats arise.

In terms of operating expenditures, we have been able to negotiate a better cyber insurance rate with our insurance company due to the fact that we are covered by Umbrella.

Another benefit of using Cisco Umbrella is application scanning. We have been able to understand how many other applications we were consuming in the cloud, address them, and save money. Without Cisco Umbrella, we would not have realized that we had so many cloud applications in the company.

We have been able to close at least four or five applications that were duplicates of others that we were already using in the company. We have realized approximately 10,000 to 12,000 euros a year of immediate savings in an organization of 150 people, which is quite significant.

Client delivery and client updates should be improved. Client delivery was not as easy as expected. Another area for improvement is the integration of escalation procedures for security issues.

In the next release, I would like to see the addition of notification flows like SMS and popups.

Cisco Umbrella is stable. We have had some issues, for example, when deploying from home or from slow networks, but 99% might be covered by a backup deployment of the client.

The moment Cisco Umbrella is installed, it scales. It's a matter of deploying policies. You can scale from one to thousands or tens of thousands of clients very quickly.

We are mainly supported by our partner. We escalate to Cisco's technical support when needed, and they are always outstanding. I would rate them at ten out of ten.

Positive

In my environment, the initial deployment was not as easy as we expected it to be. The delivery of the client in a Mac environment was not that easy, and the fact that we do not have a directory made things a bit more complicated. On the other hand, as soon as we were able to deliver the client, everything went well. We were able to deploy the solution in one week.

We were supported by our partner both on the network side and the security side. Being a solution focused on the client, we involved the partner for support on the endpoints, which are the critical part of the delivery.

Our experience working with our partner was good because they know our organization and our needs. When you increase security, you may see a higher number of false positives. Our partner played a key role resolving any issues that arose for the customer during deployment.

Cisco Umbrella is not a cheap product. However, it's not a matter of the cost; it's more a matter of the value of security. It is easy to measure this value when you have a security incident. I think the price is a good trade-off for a product that can help you avoid security threats.

You can try to partner as much as you can with insurance and other companies. It can help you reduce acquisition costs.

We had several reasons for choosing Cisco Umbrella, including the rise in attacks, the need to be careful with our customers' information, and our desire to have an extra layer of information security.

The main reason for going with Cisco Umbrella versus other competing solutions was its capability to integrate with our network. The first deployment we did was pure DNS and was a client deployment. Then, we were sure that we wanted to have a deeper integration. The fact that we are 100% running on Meraki infrastructure helped us to have this blended architecture, which is very efficient from the point of view of the client, service, and security.

If you're considering Cisco Umbrella, my advice would be to take your time and have 10% to 20% of your company pilot the solution. It's a solution that is easy to pilot in a specific environment, even with very deep integration with the network. I would advise you to go with a good use case, pilot the solution, and then move forward with a broader deployment.

On a scale from one to ten, I would rate Cisco Umbrella at nine.

I had an agreement with OpenDNS which was the original owner of the solution, and I was selling it as an MSP. In Spain, I offer it to a company called Ares Capital. At the start, it was designed to filter URLs for sites that management didn't want the people to access, such as adult sites and social media sites that may cause a loss of work time. A few years later, the solution introduced the ability to filter malware sites. We used that not as an accessory characteristic, but as the main characteristic. We moved from filtering unwanted sites to filtering malware and virus-infected sites. We still use some filtering for unwanted sites, but mostly for security reasons.

Cisco Umbrella was designed to allow hybrid work. When the COVID pandemic started, we didn't have to do anything at all because the computers were already set up for remote work. With Cisco, it doesn't matter where the computer is as long as the computer is using the DNS servers that Cisco Umbrella works with. If it's part of a laptop or wherever you are in the world, it works exactly the same as being in the office. 

It is very important the solution provides a single pane of glass management for our organization in order to help manage the complex software and programs that companies use. This saves a lot of time for managers.

The single pane of glass management optimizes the user experience by allowing the user to access restricted sites much faster and easier from a centralized location.

Cisco Umbrella helps us remediate threats quickly. The solution doesn't work with our internal network, it instead works with the DNS servers that are located all around the world. This means Cisco Umbrella doesn't have any effect on our network whatsoever. In fact, Cisco Umbrella is totally different from other solutions that are locally based, which filter on routers or firewalls. The solution acts as an outside firewall. The rules that are set up on the Cisco Umbrella management site affect the connection between the computers everywhere, but it doesn't slow them down.

The employee morale has improved with Cisco Umbrella because they don't need to be as cautious when visiting sites knowing that the solution is taking care of their security for them. The only thing that could happen to an employee is that they may need to access a site that is blocked and they have to report that blocked site. When a site is blocked for an employee, a page appears on their computer and they can report that blocked site from there. The employee can send the administrator a direct message requesting access. A blocked site occurs infrequently and the administrator can unblock the site quickly.  

The most valuable feature is the ability to filter malware sites that could infect clients or allow them to download infected files.

Cisco Umbrella is one of the best solutions in the market because it's very simple to use and very simple to set up. We require some knowledge of filtering rules, but it doesn't take that long to get familiarized with them. We can manage all the working locations, even if they are far away from a single point and the solution is easy to use. The vendor is a pioneer in the central management of security compared to other antivirus companies.

Cisco Umbrella provides a single pane of glass management.

 Cisco Umbrella doesn't slow the network down because it filters outside of the network.

Cisco Umbrella is not a solution that we can rely on for everything, but for the cost, it is a valued layer of defense that we can depend on. Cisco Umbrella's resilience complements any antivirus solution well. The main advantage of Cisco Umbrella is that it stops attacks from happening before they reach the antivirus solution.

Cybersecurity resilience is important to our organization because we provide software-driven services. We need to contact people from all over the world, We need to be able to navigate through many different sites safely. This gives peace of mind to our customers. We visit thousands of websites every year and it is important to have a solution that takes into account that we are not visiting the same websites repeatedly.

The rule-making process for blocking sites or for blocking characteristics can use some simplification. For example, types of malware. This would make it easier to use because it has a learning curve.

There is a possibility of creating users that have explicit permissions to access sites that nobody else should access. This process can be cumbersome and it would be helpful if there was an easier way to create users and assign roles to special users.

Cisco could ease the process of defining the number of licenses and the price considering the number of licenses we require. Currently, we have to get a quote for anything over 100 licenses.

I have been using the solution for ten years. Before the solution was acquired by Cisco it was OpenDNS Enterprise.

The solution is extremely stable. 

Maintaining network connectivity is very easy. We have not had any downtime in over 10 years. Cisco Umbrella doesn't work directly through the network. It works with the DNS servers that are outside of the network. The network itself doesn't affect it at all. Cisco Umbrella doesn't affect the internal workings, hardware, software, switches, or routers. As long as we have set up the DNS correctly in the computers, either locally or through Active Directory, everything works no matter what happens with our network.

The solution is scalable. We started off with around 40 computers and now have over 200.

I contacted technical support two or three times by email because I had doubts about a rule, but it was pretty straightforward. They responded back within 24 hours. I'm not sure if we can contact them now by phone because I have only used the email method.

Positive

Previously, we were using an antivirus company for antiviral protection. The problem with antivirus is that it's reactive. It does not proactively avoid infection. Cisco Umbrella is proactive because it blocks sites before we may get an infection. We don't react to infections; we proactively avoid infections. Although there are solutions now that do the same, Cisco Umbrella was the first to market.

The initial setup is straightforward and only required one person. Setting up the solution usually takes between 30 minutes to an hour. However, the rules are always changing, so we never truly finish setting it up. We're always changing the configuration of the sites by blocking or allowing or adding new sites to the blacklist or whitelist. 

To change the local DNS settings to use the Cisco Umbrella service, we only need to make a few changes. If the computers are connected to Active Directory, we can deploy the configuration through Active Directory so we don't have to mess with anything else. The solution is based on the cloud, so we get a lot of detail and granularity in what sites the computers can access. However, if we want more detail, we can install a small agent on the computer so they can report to the servers.

The implementation was completed in-house.

We have definitely seen a return on investment given the low cost of the solution.

Cisco has a set price for a single license up to 100, but whenever we get over 100, we have to ask for a quote. Sometimes requesting quotes makes the process a little harder because people's trust waivers when having to ask for quotes. We want to see the prices upfront.

I give the solution a nine out of ten.

The solution is very good, one of the best in the market because it is so easy to use and so easy to manage even from far away distances. The company has four locations, one in Madrid, one in Valencia, another in Alicante, and one in Barcelona. The solution allows me to manage all the sites from one location easily.

Given the rise in attacks and virus infections all over the world recently, it is important to have layers of security. The less intrusive solutions are better for us. I believe that Cisco Umbrella is a solution that everybody should have because the solution is easy to set up and manage. Cisco Umbrella gives us peace of mind, which is why I believe it is a great solution. I had problems in Spain when I tried to set up Cisco Umbrella for other companies but this was because people didn't know about the solution or trust it as much as they should.

Initially, we implemented the solution for the central branch in Madrid, and after that, we implemented it in the regional branches. We then differentiated between departments, and in the end, we were managing departments and offices.

I deployed it as an end-user management solution in a large IT practice, and for our end-users to have secure internet access. I've also advised on it as a consultant for companies wanting to use it to deploy SASE-type solutions.

It's really hard to have a firewall everywhere. It's also really hard to have somebody follow a user on the internet and make sure that they're doing things securely. Having a tool that's on an endpoint that you know is always connected and always pushing people to the right locations, avoiding redirects and malicious intent, has been the biggest benefit for us.

We were exposed to ransomware attacks at a very early stage in our company. Cisco Umbrella is one of the ways that we have found to help prevent ransomware attacks. It also helps prevent users from going to places that they shouldn't be going to, beyond just firewalls and email security. It is an extra level of protection that really helps make us feel comfortable at night.

The fact that Cisco Umbrella helps support hybrid work is really the key, having an endpoint protected wherever it is, whether it's on or off your network. That's what everybody on the planet is looking for right now.

It has also, 100 percent, helped us remediate threats more quickly.

The most valuable thing is how easy it is to deploy. We did it with 9,000 users at my last job, and it took a week to get to all the endpoints. Doing that without having to physically touch all those endpoints was very simple. 

The single pane of glass management makes it very easy to manage your rollout. We get a lot of "single panes of glass" and, eventually, you need a pane of panes of glass. But it's always good to have a clear and graphical view, and Umbrella's is nice and easy to read. Definitely, of the panes of glass that we do have, it's one of the easiest to use.

The single pane of glass is good to group users together and separate people out. Some people need different types of security. Some people are more vulnerable. Some have more highly valuable assets, like C-suite people. It's really good to be able to have end-users defined inside of that. You don't have to jump around. You don't have to figure out who's who. It's all done through one pane of glass.

What most people don't realize is that it's running in the background, which is a really nice aspect when it comes to security. Often, when you deploy a security tool, it takes up CPU performance. Everything slows to a grind. But Umbrella is so simple and easy and it doesn't affect the end-user experience. It's the best of all worlds. It's nice when people realize that they're being protected when they go to the wrong site. I think people are happy that they're protected, but it's nice that they rarely notice it.

It's generally easy to maintain network connectivity, but with Umbrella, the nice part is that whichever connectivity you're on, you're always secure. With Umbrella, as long as you're online, you're going to be protected.

I'd like to see improvement in its overall integration with all the other platforms. There's some integration between Umbrella and Meraki, but an overall Cisco problem is that there are so many different tools, and finding easy, seamless ways of connecting everything together is always a challenge. Always, with Cisco tools, there is the issue of finding ways to have fewer windows to look at and how to make those tools work together better.

I have been using Cisco Umbrella for over six years.

It's a cloud service. Beyond the actual tool working, the most important thing is its availability.

As long as the internet connectivity is up, I've never had a problem with Umbrella not being there. It's a tool that we have never been concerned will go down while our internet connectivity is up.

Security always has to be there. As long as your security tools are available, that's when you can be the most secure. With Umbrella, especially, we have never had an issue where it was out and we needed protection. It's probably one of the most resilient tools available on the planet. For sure, it's amazing.

I'm sure there are bigger customers than us, but we had 9,000 endpoints secured in a month's time without a blip in the system or in performance. For us, it has been impressive.

Meraki and Umbrella support are great. We have never had an issue with Umbrella, so we haven't had to evaluate support there. But whenever we have had issues with the integration between Meraki and Umbrella, Meraki support has been amazing.

Positive

We did not have a previous solution.

It was pretty straightforward. We loaded the client into Meraki Systems Manager, and then we were able to push it to all devices inside our network that had Systems Manager. It was pretty much three clicks.

We had full Meraki stacks as most of our network deployment. We were 100 percent cloud on our solutions. Umbrella sits in between our on-premises networks or between our users at home and between our cloud applications that we use at our clinic and office locations.

We did it in-house.

The return is that you don't get breached. It's a hard thing to quantify because if you don't get breached, you don't know what the value of that breach would have been. By not being breached and by being able to mitigate ransomware attacks, there is definitely return on investment.

The pricing is great and very competitive with the rest of the market. 

With everything to do with security, you should never worry about price because it's all about risks. The cost of $20 to $30 a license for Umbrella might protect you from $4 to $5 million worth of ransomware. It depends on your risk profile.

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.

For C-suites that want more security resilience in their organizations, I would tell them to adopt cloud technologies as much as they can. Try to find things that will help you scale because, when you keep things on-premises, you have to be the cloud provider yourself. Tools that other people have already stretched across, and on whose service you can rely, are generally going to be better than what you can do yourself. Either that or it's going to be very expensive for you to provide that service in-house.

Umbrella is probably one of the best tools out there in all the security landscape. It's very valuable to all people who are looking to deploy secure internet access. Everything has been perfect as far as we have used it.

My company's biggest use case for Cisco Umbrella is for DNS security protection for five years. A year and a half ago, we were able to upgrade and upsell a project to Umbrella's SIG. So, now we're working on a new upgrade to new packages, including Citrix ZTNA.

In my opinion, DNS protection is basic for most customers. But the simplest way to protect web traffic is with its functionality, like SWG. 

L7 and the firewall in the cloud are good features. We always hear good feedback from our customers.

I'm hoping for the conversion of Cisco ZTNA's features from Duo to Umbrella. This feature was announced at Cisco Live. I think Cisco is now on the right way to being the most competitive against some vendors like Netskope and Zscaler. 

I have been using Cisco Umbrella since somewhere between 2014 and 2015.

Stability-wise, I rate the solution a nine out of ten. I only saw an impact once on its stability, and that was when I was working five years ago in the support in Johnson & Johnson environment, and Johnson uses SIP security for everything. So, one of the things was that in the bank that uses it, it was miscategorized in Cisco Umbrella. After I did investigations, I found that the problem was not in Cisco Umbrella. The problem was with the bank because they needed to split the data centers in Umbrella, and Umbrella could not recognize the object.

Compared to the past, in my opinion, Cisco's support is better nowadays. The policies have decreased a little, in my opinion, but it still offers the best support in IT. This is common feedback from customers, including the ones that complain about Cisco's partners, but at the same time, they say its support is better than all different competitors. I rate the support an eight out of ten.

Positive

In my company, we are partnered with one of the competitors of Cisco Umbrella.

We sell Cisco since we are one of the biggest partners of Cisco in our region, Latin America. Also, I think that Umbrella is a good solution. But Cisco should have considered improving it in the last few years. For example, if you compare Cisco Umbrella against McAfee, Zscaler, or Netskope, three years ago, Umbrella had a lot of the main features for the market drive, SSE, DLP, l7 firewall, and ZTNA. So, now I think Cisco Umbrella has everything to show and be the next leader partner.

I wasn't involved in the solution's setup phase. I do the sales in my company, and the ones responsible for deployment in my company are from another sales team. In the past, during the initial years of Cisco, I was involved in deployment.

Regarding the ease of deployment, I am 100 percent sure that it is the easiest solution. Also, I have already worked before, even in Cisco Portfolio.

My customers have seen an ROI using the solution, mainly considering the time it shows the attacks and what the threats are. Personally, I saw a presentation to suppliers with the title stating SaaS is the newest SOC's best friend, and this is a reality. I have a customer, the biggest bank in Brazil, and they adopted Cisco Umbrella's DNS Security Advantage as one of the main features in the SOC, which is integrated into the bank, which is one of the most valuable for the customer.

Cisco Umbrella now has a good price in the basic packages. When it comes to Cisco Umbrella SIG Essentials package and Cisco Umbrella Secure Internet Gateway (SIG) Advantage package, it depends on whether the project has a good price or not. For example, we are not able to choose the SWG feature without l3 and l4 firewalls. Some vendors have that possibility. So, we know this has a price, and this has value for the customer. But most of my customers that are using Umbrella SIG Essentials don't have l3 and l4 firewalls. So, this is a problem. 

With the new features that are being introduced in Cisco Umbrella, I think we will have a new price list, and maybe things could change. Considering Umbrella for the SIG Advantage package and full feature competition against ZScaler or Netskope, they need to add all their packages. Usually, the SIG Advantage package has a markup price.

When it comes to securing my customer's infrastructure from end to end so that they can detect and remediate threats, I would say that, in general, I have had a good experience. Sometimes, just enabling Cisco Umbrella POV and the fact that DNS trust is going through Cisco Umbrella is the easiest way to show and close a lot of bad traffic nowadays. Also, 80 percent of campaigns use any kind of malicious DNS infrastructure. So now, it's very, very easy to detect such traffic.

Cisco Umbrella has helped customers consolidate any tools and applications. I say this because, with Umbrella, it is very easy to see what the users are using through the internet, especially with the basic packages.

Speaking about what effect Cisco Umbrella's ability to consolidate tools or applications has, I would say that, in general, it is easy to see what Umbrella is blocking. In some cases, for example, customers who have used traditional endpoint security solutions sometimes think that they are safe because they didn't have any alerts using that. But when these customers implement Cisco Umbrella, they realize the real scenario. It has a positive impact because today, it is able to see the real traffic and the really bad things that are inside their networks.

Regarding whether Cisco Umbrella helped to improve cybersecurity, I would say that with Cisco Umbrella, it is easier to handle the incidents because they have more information that should handle the problems and improve security in general. The base, or the first layer, I think, is the way you improve resilience.

I rate the overall solution a nine out of ten. After Cisco Channel Partner program's release, I may probably rate it a ten out of ten.

We use Cisco Umbrella to deploy policies and configurations for our company internally and some customers.

We use a lot of different Cisco products like Endpoint and Umbrella. With Cisco Umbrella, we get a total picture of security internally, especially for external sources or malware threats. I've only deployed it on one customer, and it's working well so far. We're still going through the full deployment process, but the customer likes the solution, which has worked well.

DNS protection, domain blocking, SIP component, and the Cisco Umbrella roaming client are the valuable features of Cisco Umbrella. With the way the industry is now, even if you're not in the network, you could still get the policies for your organization applied to your computer via the actual hardware or the user.

Cisco Umbrella should add some more documentation on proxies. Different organizations utilize proxies in their environment. With Umbrella, based on my experience, there are some deployment issues. It would be good to have some more documentation that can walk you step by step. The tech support is about 90% and needs to provide more step-by-step processing of the procedure and also a little more background on the solution.

I have been using Cisco Umbrella for about a year.

Cisco Umbrella has good stability.

Cisco Umbrella's scalability works fine. If it's in the cloud and you're pointing to the Cisco Umbrella DNS servers, the more users you have, you add a bigger package or a bigger tier.

Cisco Umbrella's technical support is pretty good. The biggest thing with Cisco support is that you need to ensure you provide all the necessary information. If you give a vague problem, they will give you a lot of potential solutions. With Cisco support, if you get more granular with your information and accurate documentation, you should be able to find a good solution. They usually are very helpful and useful.

Positive

Our company chose Cisco Umbrella because it's a SaaS solution. We're working to incorporate different elements into our network internally. That helps us give prospective clients or customers real-life experiences.

The basic package of Cisco Umbrella with the DNS component has been implemented in our customer's network and started working right away. I check the logs, and both the logs and the policy are working. You get a good return on investment from the very basic package in the beginning. You get those same benefits as you move up to the top tiers.

Cisco Umbrella has four tiers, and with each tier, there are different levels of abilities in those packages. You get what you pay for if you break the solution up into tiers.

Cisco Umbrella is deployed via the cloud in our organization.

I would give Cisco Umbrella nine out of ten for securing our infrastructure from end to end. The solution does what it's stated that it would do. With different packages, you get different levels of security. However, the main component of Cisco Umbrella was the DNS component or the DNS protection, which it does very well.

Once you first deploy Cisco Umbrella, you might not have to go back and update the policy config. However, in and of itself, it still requires a level of project time, deployment, design, documentation, and implementation.

I deployed an integration between SecureX and Umbrella for one of our customers. I can jump on SecureX and see if there's any block. I can read the information on SecureX, and then if I need to go to Umbrella, I can click the launch icon, and it will take me right there. That's pretty good and useful.

Cisco Umbrella's ability to consolidate tools has had a good effect on our customer's security infrastructure. SecureX is a big component for a lot of Cisco security suites, and they can integrate all that together. We've integrated a lot of our Cisco products into that one SecureX platform. I don't particularly deal with the internal because that's more our IT department. However, I've viewed the dashboard, and it's very useful. With the customer, we deployed Endpoint, we deployed Umbrella, and we'll be deploying Duo, and then those things can be integrated into SecureX.

Cisco Umbrella's DNS and SecureWeb Gateway components have helped improve our organization's cybersecurity resilience. More granular policies could be built for security, implementation, and ensuring no threats enter our internal organization.

If you're looking for DNS protection without a bunch of firewall commands and configurations, a simple deployment, and a policy build, Cisco Umbrella is a good way to go. It's deployed in the cloud and not hard to deploy. So if you want to get something up and going right away, Cisco Umbrella is a good bet.

Implementing Cisco Umbrella into our environment was pretty easy. I worked on it, and once they gave me access, I did my research and built the policies in adherence to whatever they asked.

Overall, I rate Cisco Umbrella a nine out of ten.

We're using Cisco Firepower to replace the ASAs as perimeter firewalls to the university's network. We're predominantly using Cisco Umbrella for web filtering of staff and student web traffic that is generated from the university campuses.

Cisco solutions are simple, efficient, and effective. We're definitely seeing that our users are protected by using these solutions. We're using Cisco Umbrella to protect around 1,500 staff and about 15,000 to 16,000 students. At any one time, on our campus, we could have 3,000 student endpoints protected and about 1,500 members of staff with laptops who are working hybrid since COVID. So, they're protected when they're on campus and when they're off campus. As a university in Edinburgh with three main campuses, we have two internet connections where firewalls protect us from bad stuff on the internet.

Cisco solutions have invariably saved us time. Without them, we would've had ransomware attacks and cyber attacks. So, they have helped protect us as much as they can. I don't have the metrics, but it's a university, so we're probably quite often under attack.

Our operating expenditures (OpEx) haven't really reduced. With moving to subscription-based, our OpEx has probably gone up rather than our CapEx coming down. 

The insight into what our users are doing via Cisco Umbrella is valuable. Knowing that we're protecting our users as they leave our network is also valuable now because we've got more hybrid working. With Cisco Umbrella and Cisco Secure clients on all our hybrid working laptops, we know that our staff is secure even when they're working from home.

They should provide more integrations and bring things together so that there is a more standard feel to their platform. We also use Cisco ISE, and it has a very different feel from Cisco Umbrella. We also have some Meraki products which feel very different from others. It's like you have to learn something new with every product you buy.

We've had Cisco ASAs, but we're just in the process of replacing them with Firepower, so Firepower is quite new. We've been using Cisco Umbrella since 2020.

We have a good Cisco partner called Ping Network Solutions in Scotland, so anytime we need to reach out for a bit of advice, we can ask them. We had good pre-sale support with Cisco as well to ensure that we get the right products that match our requirements. I'd rate their customer service a nine out of ten.

Positive

Instead of Cisco Umbrella, we used Zscaler for web filtering, but we've always had Cisco firewalls.

When we switched in 2020, Zscaler didn't seem to be developing their product as well. It didn't match our requirements anymore.

I was involved in its deployment although I had a technical team working underneath me. It was easier than Zscaler because Zscaler made us have two instances, one for staff and one for students. It was very complicated, and we had to route traffic in different ways. Being able to do it by DNS with Cisco Umbrella was just easy.

I managed the team that was deploying it. My role involved making decisions about what traffic and which groups of users we put through first, some early field tests, and things like that.

We did it all by ourselves.

We have seen an ROI. With Zscaler, we had more operational issues than we've had with Cisco Umbrella.

You get what you pay for.

We use Cisco Firepower, and we use Cisco Umbrella. Currently, these two products are not very integrated. We don't have the complete suite of Cisco solutions. We just have two that aren't joined. We also work with other technology partners, such as Microsoft, but in terms of the perimeter of our network, it has always been a solid product like the Cisco firewall.

I'd rate Cisco Umbrella a nine out of ten.

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.

Cisco is a very efficient and on-point solution that controls the whole network and settings on one page. We can monitor the entire network.

The solution could be faster as the process is very slow.

I have been using Cisco Umbrella as a reseller for four to five years.

I rate the solution’s stability an eight and a half out of ten.

We have deployed it to small businesses.

I rate the solution’s scalability an eight out of ten.

The initial setup is straightforward and takes few hours to complete.

I rate the initial setup a nine out of ten, where one is difficult, and ten is easy.

ROI is pretty good. I rate it as eight out of ten.

You need to buy an additional license for customer services. The licensing is moderate.

I recommend the solution.

Overall, I rate the solution as eight and a half out of ten.