Cisco Umbrella Reviews

We use Cisco Umbrella to protect our DNS queries and the traffic going out.

Cisco Umbrella is transparent to my users; they are unaware of its presence. The documentation they use is solely for the IT staff. It is functioning exceptionally well, to the point where I no longer require extensive documentation for its operation.

It has reduced malware and mitigated risks associated with email links and various other factors, resulting in cost savings.

Cisco Umbrella helps secure our infrastructure, enabling us to effectively detect and remediate threats. Apart from host-based firewalls or malware attempting to bypass threat detection, we currently do not have any other alternatives. Although there may be competing solutions available, we have been using Umbrella, and it has served us well.

Cisco Umbrella helps free up IT staff time indirectly by reducing the number of calls we receive regarding malware or bad calls.

Our organization improved its cybersecurity resilience by effectively blocking threats with Cisco Umbrella.

We used one feature, which is aimed at protecting our users from accessing malware-infected websites and encountering associated problems.

I am unsure if Cisco Umbrella offers a Windows option for running the server. However, since I am not familiar with Linux, I had to rely on someone else to handle that aspect. I'm not completely convinced that using Windows would be a superior solution, as Linux is generally regarded as more stable. However, it would benefit individuals like myself who are unfamiliar with Linux.

I have been using Cisco Umbrella for seven years.

I haven't needed to reboot the servers for years due to their excellent stability.

For the size we have, Cisco Umbrella has worked out really well in terms of scalability.

The solution that was previously used was acquired by Cisco and turned into Umbrella.

I have seen a return on investment using Cisco Umbrella.

The pricing model is easier compared to some of the other solutions, and it is also competitive.

I rate Cisco Umbrella a nine out of ten.

I recommend that people try Cisco Umbrella because I believe it is the best option available.

I have never needed to utilize technical support because the solution has consistently functioned effectively.

Cisco Umbrella enables all of our end users to browse the internet and internal networks securely. It can block different things like sites and applications that they shouldn't access according to company policies. For example, we can block different applications or specific site categories.

We also use Cisco SecurePort and SecureX, which is a platform for integrating various Cisco products. We have already integrated Cisco Secure Endpoint and Cisco Umbrella through SecureX, which offers a single pane of glass so you can see all the problems. We have also integrated our Meraki firewalls and access points. We have 500 users, and each of them has the Umbrella agent installed. If you're working in the office, you don't need it because every computer is protected by Umbrella. 

The main benefit of Cisco Umbrella is to prevent the end users from becoming victims of phishing attacks or malicious links in an email. It isn't necessarily about making the users more efficient or productive, but it could help with that. For example, if someone mistakenly clicks on a link and their device is infected, we may need to take it offline for a day or two in order to resolve it. We don't have these incidents, so we can ensure that users won't be affected by any malicious activities and can continue doing what they're doing without worrying about other departments getting infected.

Umbrella lets you inspect client Internet traffic as if it were flowing through a traditional data center security stack. The main thing you can do is check the destination they're trying to access, but you cannot inspect the package. You can see the URL, but you cannot fully inspect the way we're actually using it. The primary goal is to block or allow specific URLs. We don't do any inspection or use any proxy to inspect traffic. 

I would say that we save money using this product because it's easy to use, so you don't need an expert to operate it. It requires some expertise, but it's simple to monitor and maintain. Also, when we want to set up offices in new areas, it's easy to integrate. 

Umbrella is constantly discovering new vulnerabilities. The solution's ability to discover zero-day attacks without significant changes to the platform is crucial. For example, we prohibit certain categories of websites like gaming or gambling, and the categories are constantly updated. We don't need to update the categories to add new websites or constantly check those reports because we know that Umbrella does what it's supposed to. 

The interface is well organized, so you can easily find everything. Even if you don't have much experience with Cisco, you can easily navigate the solution and find your way around. Everything has been done well, from the deployment to monitoring. 

The application is really stable. We never have problems with Cisco not working for our end users. We have an internal communication hub. The office implementation is integrated with our security systems and firewalls, but we also have users worldwide working from home. Our employees are pleased with the user experience, and we've never had reports about Umbrella not working properly or being unable to access a site. It's integrated with Cisco AnyConnect, so our users can access it through a VPN solution.

Umbrella actively processes and blocks malicious DNS queries daily, which is helpful for us because we're a small team. We heavily depend on the tool to do its job properly. It works nicely out of the box. You have to do a little initial configuration, but after that, it blocks everything we want and nothing we don't. We've gotten some false positives with other products, but we've never experienced that with Cisco Umbrella.

Guest internet access is easy to configure. We set more restrictive policies for our guest users, but it hasn't been difficult to spin up consistent policies in three or four different offices. We just attached the policy that we have for guest users to a specific wireless SSID.

Umbrella combines multiple security functions into a single dashboard. If you use Cisco SecureX, there is a dashboard in Umbrella, but you have to look at different areas. In Cisco SecureWorks, you can add the tasks and dashboards you want to monitor, but Umbrella is more standardized, so you cannot make many changes. In addition to the dashboard, we have some daily reports and email alerts. It does what we want. 

Cisco Umbrella hasn't integrated customized reporting yet. With Cisco Secure Endpoint Hub, I can see a report on user downloads and set it up to constantly get an email alert. Based on my understanding, Cisco Umbrella can't do that. You can set it up with third parties, but it would be better if that were built into the platform. 

I joined this company a year ago, but they had already been using Cisco Umbrella for more than three years. 

I have never experienced any outages or downtime. It works all the time.

I rate Cisco support nine out of 10. We had to open a ticket because we had some issues installing the agents, but we haven't had trouble since then. The technical team responded and fixed our issues quickly.

Positive

I used a similar SaaS solution by Palo Alto, but Cisco Umbrella seems to be quite unique because it's a DNS layer. I'm not sure if any other company is doing the same thing. We integrate Cisco Secure Endpoint and Cisco Umbrella to provide end-user detection and prevention. It does what it's supposed to do with most of a lot of admin work. It's a gateway.

I wasn't part of the deployment, but it seems to be straightforward based on what I have seen. It requires a few adjustments to the firewalls and some integration, but it seems relatively simple. We needed to help the users working from home install the agents for Umbrella and AnyConnect, and this was also straightforward to deploy with Kandji, our MDM system.

After deployment, Umbrella doesn't require much maintenance because it's a SaaS application like Gmail. You don't have to do anything except the admin work, such as adding websites or categories. However, Umbrella uses an agent, so we need to update the engine. We can automate all these things, so the maintenance is minimal. 

It's hard to quantify a return, but the cost of a malware attack or customers losing private information is potentially very high. I don't have the numbers for those things, but Cisco Umbrella helps us to avoid those issues. A breach can harm our reputation and damage the entire organization.

Cisco Umbrella is reasonably priced for what it does. I don't have any numbers to compare it with because I don't recall what the other solutions cost. 

I rate Cisco Umbrella nine out of 10.

I use Cisco Umbrella mainly for content filtering. We use it to ensure that my users don't access something they shouldn't be accessing. It's just like pushing and scan prevention.

There are a countless number of attacks that Cisco Umbrella prevented from happening in our organization.

Suppose we see a very silly entry where a bad actor tries to impersonate a good website or service we continuously use. They buy the domain, misspell it somehow, and then inject that in a link. Suppose my email scanning tools did not detect or notice that for one reason or another, and we identified it later. We immediately block impersonating users from accessing services over Cisco Umbrella-controlled devices.

iOS devices and mobiles are huge in my environment right now, and I cannot run them on Cisco Umbrella 24/7. Each user has one desktop but three or four mobile devices on two iPads, and a phone or multiple phones and an iPad, or vice versa. I'd like to turn on my Cisco Umbrella on the network level, at least on my office premise. However, my security team would like to keep all devices on-network and off-network to be connected or managed by Cisco Umbrella all the time. So their use cases are higher and stronger than my mobile ones. Sometimes we try to work around my mobile ones with MDM, but sometimes it would be way more flexible to have both running side-by-side.

Also, in the Apple services or the Apple space, between my Cisco Umbrella and between my Apple updates, something breaks. I'm not sure if it's because of a policy that my company did before I joined them or if it's something that's happening due to a conflict in the configuration somewhere. So we always have to completely get the device or the endpoint out of any filtration to get the policies. We get everything pushed properly from Apple to the device and provision it afterward. Then we add the Cisco Umbrella roaming client to it.

Cisco Umbrella has been running in my environment for about five years, and it was there even a couple of years before I joined my company.

We've never really seen any service outages or downtime with Cisco Umbrella. It is amazing for a product to be running such a long marathon for the amount of time that I have witnessed it.

Cisco Umbrella is very flexible. Before, after, and during the years of the pandemic, my environment went up and down concerning headcount and use cases. Since Cisco Umbrella is pretty flexible, it was able to scale with us.

On the technical side, we always get our questions answered in a reasonable turnover. There was an incident when I had two instances running, and I tried to research it first and run discovery with it. When I couldn't find the answer immediately, we called Cisco, and somebody over the phone was very helpful and told us within ten minutes that it wouldn't work for us.

Positive

The initial setup was pretty straightforward. The solution's documentation is great. My environment needed a little bit of customization to match the deployment configuration or documentation, and it worked fine.

We implemented Cisco Umbrella through an in-house team.

We have seen a return on investment with Cisco Umbrella regarding the working hours and the ticketing. The tickets do not have to get escalated to a network engineer or to a network person to look at. They could be worked on by someone on the app on tier one or tier two before needing an escalation if it even needs it.

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

The security team deployed Cisco Umbrella in our organization. I deployed the solution briefly on my network infrastructure, and then we decided to switch that off because we noticed a conflict when we had it running at two different places.

I cannot really speak so much on the infrastructure because until recently, whenever we installed Cisco clients on a machine that's running a server, the machine broke. The reason for that is something that happens in the trust relationship between the server and the domain controller. We opened a support case with Cisco Umbrella, and they told us the server was not supported. Servers are not meant for browsing, and the environment that they are in should not be open to the entire world.

My network team is not that large. For content filtering, when a request comes in to unblock a website saying that it is misclassified, it's super easy to give enough access or limited access to the support desk agent or analyst that's getting your clients' calls. The turnover time is much quicker and much shorter. We do not have to deal with maintenance windows or change management times because it's easy to go to a portal or website and change it versus changing a configuration on a firewall. It helps a lot with hybrid environments, especially during the unprecedented times we had a couple of years ago when we all decided to work from home. My environment was 90% ready to work from home, and one of the reasons for that was Cisco Umbrella.

In a 2000-user environment, Cisco Umbrella has helped save at least 14 hours weekly.

Cisco Umbrella has changed the way that we have access to a tool. It helps us do content filtering. I do not need DNS servers running anymore on my network because I identify it on the Cisco Umbrella portal, and everybody gets the configuration within 30 seconds to a minute. I do not have to deal with DNS changes, especially for internal tools and websites.

Cisco Umbrella has helped our organization improve its cybersecurity resilience for the end clients by having that on-off network flexibility. I do not necessarily have everybody run on a VPN all the time.

The nearest product to Cisco Umbrella is not even comparable. Cisco Umbrella's feature richness and compatibility are becoming an industry standard. We do not ask if an environment has a DNS server running in it or not. Instead, today we ask whether that is a Cisco Umbrella environment.

Overall, I rate Cisco Umbrella ten out of ten.

We're an MSP. We implement it for customers, and we also use it in our organization.

I'm not a technical guy. From my perspective, as an executive, it gives us more peace of mind knowing that our traffic is secure. There's basically an extra layer of security for all our traffic, so our customers' data is secure, and our own data is more secure. There's just peace of mind for me.

It does a pretty good job of securing the infrastructure from end to end. We're happy with it. That's the internet gateway security that we sell. There are other competitors out there, but it's agnostic to equipment. It very easily integrates with our customer base, which is mostly Meraki. The dashboard and reporting are very easy and very transparent for our customers, so we can do a good job of explaining to them their issues, what's been mitigated, and what're the advantages. They have visibility over why they're paying for this service. 

It has helped us to consolidate tools. We use most of Meraki. It's from top to bottom, so everything is in a single pane of glass.

It has definitely saved time and money. We're able to onboard a customer for a trial in minutes, so after a sales pitch call, we can onboard them the same day. That's pretty amazing.

It has improved our cybersecurity resilience to the point that we haven't had issues. In security, not having issues is very good. We're able to keep up with the threats with a partner like Cisco and make sure that the best practices are met both at the on-premise level with the firewalls and then over the cloud. When they're not in the office or when they're remotely working, everything is secure.

For our scope or type of customers, which are retail customers with many branches, as an MSP, we take care of everything related to security. It allows us to manage many customers at the same time, and it allows the customer to focus on the other aspects of their business and leave the cybersecurity and networking to us.

For us and for customers, it's the ease of integration with Meraki. It's just a couple of clicks. That allows us to deploy very fast, and it doesn't change the way a customer uses his service. It's just more secure.

For us, as an MSP, the initial licensing changes were a roadblock, and they still could be a lot clearer. Specifically, it's an honor-based licensing system. We'd like it to be more specific to our traffic or our users so that we can make sure that the customer is paying for all their licensing.

We've been using Cisco Umbrella for about a year.

We've implemented it for maybe a thousand users.

That's pretty good. I'd rate them a nine out of ten. More Spanish would be better for our techs. We're based in Panama.

Positive

We've tried other products and other gateways from Fortinet and Arbor. We chose Cisco Umbrella. The most important thing for us is that we're fully Meraki stack. We have thousands of deployments of Meraki, so it's very easy for us to implement. Our customers are long-time Meraki users, so they're very comfortable with the Cisco stack.

It's deployed on the cloud, but I wasn't involved in its deployment.

We've seen an ROI with this product.

In terms of licensing, we're not able to be extremely clear with the customer because it's based on their reporting. It's not based on the actual traffic. If they say they have 50 users but they have 80, we'll just buy for 50 users. That's something where we'd like to have more flexibility.

Overall, I'd rate Cisco Umbrella a nine out of ten. There's always room for improvement, but it's very good.

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 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.

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.