Cisco Umbrella Reviews

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 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.

We use the solution for DNS security and web filtering. Our industries include banking and insurance. 

The customer experience is very good, and the product improves security posture. 

Cisco Umbrella is difficult to manage and needs to include a dashboard. It needs to improve pricing as well. 

I have been using the product for three years. 

I rate Cisco Umbrella's stability a nine out of ten. 

I rate the tool's scalability an eight out of ten. 

The tool's deployment is easy; I rate it a nine out of ten. The speed of deployment depends on various factors, including our communication with other customer contacts.

I rate the tool's pricing a five out of ten. 

Cisco Umbrella is the best solution for DNS security in the market. Our customers are enterprise businesses. I rate it an eight out of ten. 

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.

Cisco Umbrella is a first line of defense. It protects the users from going to sites that should be avoided. Cisco Umbrella also protects against malware and phishing. It's a simple and very effective product that works seamlessly in the background. It doesn't disturb you in any way unless you access a website you shouldn't. Then, it will interfere with it and stop you from going there.

It would be good if the more complex versions of Umbrella are simplified so that we can offer them in a more standardized way. We, as a telco, do not operate the same as a traditional integration partner would, who can sell all its services. We try to have a standardized approach as much as we can so that we can sell the solution with as many services added to it as possible. If you look at the structure of businesses in Switzerland, 95% of them have 10 persons or less, and they do not have a security specialist. Therefore, the higher the automated and standardized features, the better it is for them.

We've been offering Umbrella for three to four years.

I've been working with Cisco's products for several years now. We in the B2B area of Sunrise work with Cisco kind of exclusively, it's really our main partner. I look after security products and Umbrella. The cloud-based security products around Umbrella have been the focus of my work.

As a reseller, the value we bring to our customers is the fact that instead of just selling them connectivity or access to the internet, we offer them a base level of security with it. I think that is highly valued by customers since security is typically a topic they struggle to deal with.

When it comes to the stability or performance of Umbrella, we have been very pleased. When you add security on top of unsecured transport, you may have certain delays, but our technical colleagues consider them to be not too bad. Stability has never come up in a customer context as an issue.

When we look at the scalability of Umbrella, we can see the great advantage of it being a cloud-based service. Therefore, scalability is not an issue on our side. We can assume that it will always be around and that the performance will always be good.

I've had very few interactions with Cisco support, and the ones I've had have been good. I'd give Cisco's technical support a rating of nine out of ten.

Positive

We sold a different solution previously, which provided a much simpler DNS protection. It did not have the power and is not really comparable to Umbrella. It was more of a consumer-level product that did not have much of an impact. I had it installed on my internet access at home, and it never intercepted anything I did. It's only once I installed Umbrella that I saw differences in the ways my DNS calls were intercepted. The main reason why we offer Umbrella is its business-grade security.

One of the great advantages of Umbrella DNS is that it's really simple to deploy. It's easy to install, the users do not notice that it's there, and it doesn't interfere with your work. The simplicity and transparency are great advantages of Cisco Umbrella. Cisco could take Umbrella DNS as a good example and also improve on other products.

Cisco solutions are generally perceived to be rather expensive. We have constant internal discussions as to whether we should offer lower-priced security solutions from some of the competitors.

If you are looking for the first time at Umbrella, you should really understand what is behind the solution. Behind Umbrella is Cisco Talos, a research team within Cisco, which is one of the largest private ones in the world. All the input out of the activities of Talos goes into Umbrella and makes it a really valuable product.

As a service provider, we know that other service providers are using Cisco Umbrella, and that was a big factor for us in choosing it as well. Also, we had seen large telcos like TIM in Italy using it for many years and being satisfied with it.

Customers are always worried that somebody in their organization will click on something he or she should not click on. Umbrella does a good job of protecting a business from ruin in worst-case scenarios. It works in the background and is like an airbag.

I would rate Umbrella Easy Protect, which is the simplest on the Umbrella DNS side, at nine out of ten. Because Umbrella SIG is still under development and is very promising, I'd give it an eight out of ten.

Our partnership with Cisco is overall good. It has its ups and downs. Cisco is not always an easy beast to work with. Sometimes you see that traditionally they have a very strong enterprise focus, but we as a service provider have a different need than enterprises, and that sometimes has its challenges.