Cisco Umbrella Reviews

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.

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.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

We are using the Cisco Umbrella proxy product. Cisco Umbrella is part of our ongoing project for moving, more or less, to the full Cisco suite. We have Cisco ISE, DNAC, and SD-LAN. We are getting the new SD-WAN from Cisco. It's part of the whole portfolio we are getting from Cisco.

The integration features within, for example, the Cisco VPN product and the Umbrella module are valuable. The new features, mainly the security ones, are also valuable. It improves our security, and it's much more integrated and better than the one we have from Zscaler.

The main issue that we have is with the final steps or the full integration and getting rid of Zscaler. The company still has to fall back to Zscaler when something in Umbrella is not working as expected, such as when we enable SSL inspection. When something is not working 100%, the company is falling back to Zscaler. We have very good support, and I don't know whether this can be improved, but that is one thing to do for the final steps to get rid of the other product.

Its scalability could also be improved.

I've been using this solution for two years.

The stability of the solution is very good.

It could be improved mainly because the proxy is based on countries, and when you have no point to connect in a country, you can create issues. So, the spread around the world could be better.

We have 80,000 end users, and it's all over the globe.

Their TAC support is very good, but it always depends on people. So, there is no in-general there, but the people we are dealing with are very good. I'd rate them a nine out of ten.

Positive

For proxy services, we have been using Zscaler, and for SD-WAN, we have been using Nokia Nuage. For the SD-WAN solution, we made a switch because we had a lot of issues with Nokia Nuage. Don't use Nokia Nuage. It's pretty bad.

For proxy services, we are replacing the Zscaler solution with Umbrella proxy services, but I'm not sure about the reason. It's probably for more security features where using Cisco Umbrella helps us improve our security within. It's much better than the one we have from Zscaler for securing our infrastructure from end to end.

It was very complex because of a little bit of immaturity of the Cisco Umbrella solution in the beginning. All the features were not already enabled. In addition, we also had a moving target where we said, "We would like to have this, and we would like to have that," and when it was not there, we insisted to have it in. It was very difficult and challenging.

We are using BT. I would define our experience with them as big trouble. It's in the name.

On our side, we have three to five people, but it depends on following the sun. We probably have five people worldwide who are supporting this solution.

I'd advise looking into your needs and then comparing those with the features that are really valuable. It has been improved over the last two years, but just look at your needs and what the solution can really deliver.

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

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

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

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

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

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

We've been using it for two years.

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

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

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

Positive

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

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

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

We haven't yet seen an ROI.

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

We didn't evaluate any other solution. We went for Cisco Umbrella because we already had Cisco AnyConnect. We just used the plugin, and it was very simple for us to deploy it.

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

The solution is for filtering web content. We can control user access to applications as well as have visibility into Internet usage.

We are using it on approximately 300 servers. The solution is deployed across three departments. There are about 8,000 users.

Umbrella gives us control and visibility of our network using administration tools. This is helpful for us. 

The solution is very good for helping workers feel safe, secured, supported, and included.

Employees have accepted the solution. The solution is very good for them and their morale.

It has excellent resilience in cybersecurity. Cybersecurity for my organization is very important because we are a banking organization. We need this security to protect the personal information of our clients. This is very important for our security.

The most valuable feature is its web content filtering.

It is very important for our organization that the solution offers single-pane-of-glass management.

It is very easy to maintain network connectivity. 

The customer experience has been very good.

I feel that the application needs other characteristics that are available with other applications in the market.

I have been using it for three years.

It works very well across platforms with other providers.

It is very easy to scale.

I have never needed to use their technical support.

We have just used this solution.

Our initial setup was very easy.

We used an internal consultant.

Our leaders say that cybersecurity and resilience for our services is very important. They say technology is necessary for developing business with our clients. 

I would rate the solution as nine out of 10. The solution is very good, easy to implement, and manage. The visibility is very user-friendly. 

Cisco Umbrella improves web security posture.

Meraki features and cloud-based functionality are advanced and easy to manage centrally.

Reporting is a separate product. However, other features are embedded within the devices themselves. So, if you have one box, everything is included, which is good.

A more user-friendly interface like Kaspersky and lower costs including licensing, support, and renewals would be beneficial.

My company has been using it since 2005. 

It is a stable product. 

It is a scalable product.

The customer service and support are excellent, exceeding expectations.

Positive

I used Sophos, FortiGate, and Palo Alto firewalls.

Cisco Umbrella is manageable and well-supported by various vendors and partners, including Cisco Direct. It offers diverse technologies and features. However, now Sophos and FortiGate offer better tools and firewalls than Cisco.

Forti excels in SD-WAN services and integrates various functionalities like FortiManager, FortiAnalyzer, and Wi-Fi controller within a single device.

It is easy to implement. It is not straightforward, but it is easy. It is easier than before. 

The licensing cost is very high. We have to pay for support, renewal, and maintenance. FortiNet is cheaper compared to Cisco Umbrella. 

Consider your budget. If you can afford it, Cisco Umbrella is a stable and scalable solution.

It's a strong Cisco product.

Overall, I would rate the solution a nine out of ten. 

Our primary use case was to first replace the solution we had since it wasn't able to give us security outside our premises. Also in terms of configuration, we had to have extra configurations in our Active Directory to identify the users and the equipment. Cisco Umbrella gave us a chance to do it in a more clean way, without having extra software working on our domain controllers.

Cisco Umbrella is deployed as a cloud solution with an on-premises server so that it can make the connection through our Active Directory to identify the equipment.

The most value we've seen after using it for a month is the ability to identify more clearly the usage of any device.

With Cisco Umbrella I am able to manage DNS resolutions on our devices both when they are inside and outside our network, supporting a hybrid work environment.

Umbrella has helped my IT staff in two ways. First, our security team was able to get more insights into the users, their devices, and the sites they browse. Second, our system administration team was able to manage DNS resolutions in a way that is more accessible and less intrusive to our domain system.

Soon, our IT staff will be able to save time because we'll be able to automate some security functions. The dashboard is very clean and user-friendly. Thus, at a glance, we will be able to see a lot of information that will help us identify more directly the sources and the root causes of security issues.

It's easier for us to have support features with companies who are Cisco representatives, but sometimes, it's hard for us to get the help we need without having to use our contacts within Cisco.

We've been using Cisco Umbrella for nearly a month.

We have not had any issues with stability, but we've only had the solution for one month.

The few times when we had to contact Cisco's technical support directly, we had perfect interactions with them. Therefore, I would give technical support a rating of ten out of ten.

Positive

We were using another solution for DNS security. It was not as complete and  would only allow us to manage security inside our network. We weren't able to get to the endpoints when staff were not working on-premises. We did a proof of concept with Cisco Umbrella and two other solutions for three months and chose to go with Cisco Umbrella because it gave us the features that were more suited to our organization.

In our environment, it was straightforward and simple to implement Umbrella. We had SCCM for the end devices for mass deployment. Our domain controllers were connected to the server. The initial parameterization only took us three days. Currently, we are in the most difficult part of fine-tuning the solution so we can take full advantage of its features.

Our Cisco partner helped us with the implementation.

Pricing and licensing of Cisco Umbrella is a bit confusing because you have to separate the DNS solution and the full-feature solution. Cisco in Portugal helped us understand which one was the right one for us.

Since Cisco Umbrella has given me better performance and extra features that I didn't have previously, I would give it the maximum rating of ten out of ten.

I'm a principal consultant for one of the energy sector companies, which basically extracts oil and gas and also deals with solar energy. We are dealing with anything related to energy. It's a supply chain as well.

We have been using Cisco Umbrella for more than one year. Basically, after the COVID situation, when the hybrid model came, we needed to give work-from-home options to the employees and look into cybersecurity. We had to get some cloud security. That is why we have introduced Cisco Umbrella.

We chose Cisco Umbrella because it's a better option industry-wide. It can inspect all the web traffic from anywhere. When traffic is generated from any local internet, it might be anything. It doesn't qualify for cyber security for any company. That's why you have to have something to inspect all the traffic. Cisco is a good vendor for us. That's why we chose Cisco Umbrella.

By using Cisco Umbrella, you are sure of inspecting all the traffic. Whenever the user machine is connected to your network, it is inspected. That's the best thing. It means you are sure that nothing is being exported or imported without your choice. That is the best feature.

It generates alerts, and you can integrate it with your ticketing tool. When it's integrated, it can also generate a ticket. That means you know when something is wrong or what's going on. It has helped a lot during this hybrid model, and I don't think that this hybrid model is going anywhere. So, you can simply say that Cisco Umbrella is a good tool for the future as well.

It hasn't freed up our IT staff for other projects because no one thought about this work-from-home model before COVID. There were many alerts after Cisco Umbrella was installed, which means many staff members were invested, but its automation, such as automatically generating alerts and automatically assigning tickets to a queue, has helped a lot. We don't need to do any physical or manual inspection. It's being done automatically, which is a good point, but it hasn't decreased any resource hours.

It's the best tool to inspect everything. We can inspect all the user traffic generated from anything.

If you wish to inspect all the traffic and it's integrated with Cisco AnyConnect, all the traffic basically goes through Cisco AnyConnect, which is not a good idea. That means you need to have more internet capacity as a data sampler, so in the case of a split tunnel, we cannot inspect the traffic that is being migrated through the local internet. I'm not sure whether there is a possibility wherein Cisco Umbrella can also inspect the traffic that is outside the AnyConnect tunnel.

We have been using Cisco Umbrella for more than one year.

We are a Cisco premier integrator, and I've worked for Prosperity for approximately seven months now. We just set up a new networking team predominantly servicing clients within the financial services industry.

We offer various products within the Cisco Secure product line, for example, Cisco Secure Firewall, AnyConnect, and Umbrella. As a Cisco partner, we predominantly deploy Cisco equipment, be it LAN switching or routers. Deploying Cisco Secure products makes sense because then we have one vendor in the network.

When we're deploying Cisco Umbrella, we're predominantly utilizing the DNS Essentials or the DNS Advantage license. We use it as a first layer of defense on the network because everything relies on DNS these days, so if you can capture that traffic and analyze it or analyze those DNS requests, you can very quickly start filtering out things like Command-and-Control and whether there's malware on the environments or shadow IT, for example. So, it can capture and categorize the apps that people use, and if you were to block something, you can very easily block it.

As a Cisco partner, the value we bring to our customers is our years of experience, and our customers can rely on us. We've got a saying in our company that if we look after our clients, we look after our colleagues, and we look after our customers, then we'll all prosper; hence the name Prosperity 24/7. That's our sort of motto, but it's very true. Our customers can trust us. We've got the experience. We've got the links to Cisco. We do all the training, so customers don't have to worry. It's about wrapping the customer up in a blanket and going, "Everything's going to be okay. We're here."

The benefit we get from our Cisco partnership is credibility within the marketplace because everybody has heard of Cisco, and it's probably one of the most deployed network manufacturers in the world involved in so many verticals. There's always a product there. I've been looking at so many products this week at Cisco Live, for example, that anything you can think of is there. There's always new innovation. It's an innovative company.

The feature that we find most valuable is to be able to filter out those web requests that you don't want. In a corporate environment, it can be damaging. It can be damaging to organizations as well. You don't want people going to certain sites. Also, the malware side of things and the Command-and-Control side of things are valuable because you can have serious reputational damage to your organization if there's malware in your environment. To be able to block that at its source is very important.

Umbrella is a constantly evolving product set in terms of what they had maybe four years ago compared to now. The number of features they're developing and facilities within that cloud platform are amazing. Things like data loss prevention (DLP) have been released in the last couple of years. It probably has remote browser isolation (RBI) as well, but I'll have to check that one. So, it's a constantly evolving product set. Our clients might start off on a lower tier of the Umbrella, but over time, they'll go, "Actually I want that feature." And then they'll go from DNS Essentials to DNS Advantage, and then they might start looking at Secure Internet Gateway (SIG), for example, which is just the secure web gateway (SWG). So, there's something for everybody, and as a layer of defense in your network, it's a great product.

With any Cisco product, it's the licensing side of things that needs improvement. Licensing changes and Cisco typically doesn't make it easy for us, but it does evolve. What's good now is that predominantly across the different product sectors within Cisco, you start off with DNS Essentials, Advantage, and even the Catalyst switches. That's now ubiquitous across the Cisco line. They've got to keep it simple on the licensing side so that when I go and talk to clients, I can say, "Right, here you go. With this license, you get these features, but you can always scale up." Once the customers experience Cisco Umbrella, then typically, they start thinking, "What else could I be doing?" You may start off with the DNS Essentials, but then you might move to SWG eventually.

Umbrella's availability is second to none. I remember attending Cisco Live in Barcelona where I went to one of the sessions, and they said that they've had a hundred percent uptime since forever basically, so I don't think they ever had an outage. They've got two DNS servers. They use Anycast, so it's available around the world. It will speed up your web browsing because you'll go to the closest data center. Umbrella pairs with the service providers, so it'll speed up your general web traffic as well.

In our customers' environments, in terms of scalability, absolutely, it's a very simple product to deploy. It's cloud-based, so we don't have to worry about deploying resources locally. Networks rely on DNS anyway. The whole Microsoft stack, whether you open a web browser or use Teams, relies on DNS. So, it's the first step in any web transaction.

I like working with Cisco products because I get excellent support. If it's four o'clock in the morning, I'm in a data center, and something has stopped working, I know I can just reach out to TAC, raise a TAC case, and get help. That's a comfort blanket that surrounds all of us Cisco engineers. We know we can call somebody, and we know we can get through to somebody who will have the answers for us.

I would give Cisco support a solid eight or nine. It's probably difficult to give a 10 because sometimes it depends on who you get as well, but with Cisco TAC, you can always escalate cases as well. So, there's always somebody within Cisco TAC who can help you.

Positive

In the typical deployment model, we integrate it with, for example, the Meraki product line for using Cisco Umbrella directly within the Meraki dashboard. So, you can link it to an API. That's a nice integration. You're not having separate Meraki access points or Meraki MX. You can bring it all together in one place, so you've got a single dashboard. Typically, we've done that. In the bigger organizations, we have done deployments of the virtual appliances because essentially, you want to be able to identify individual users at that point. By using the VAs, you should be able to identify users on the network, and then you can deploy policies based on those user groups.

Cisco Umbrella can be deployed in minutes. In its simplest form, all you need to do is point at the Cisco Umbrella DNS servers, and that's it. It can be literally deployed in minutes. If you want to go to a different use case, for example, where you've got to deploy VAs, that's a bit more difficult, but there's something for everybody. It can be as simple or as complex as your environment requires.

I've always worked with Cisco. I've been working with Cisco products for the last 20 years. We do have other products that we can sell for a lower price point, for example, but typically, I like using Cisco products.

To any customers who want to evaluate Umbrella, the first thing I would recommend looking at would be the product sheets within Cisco. Understand the technology, understand the features that are available, and then decide what level of Umbrella or what licensing level you require to meet your business requirements. If it's just protecting some guest WiFis, for example, then it'll be a very simple deployment. If you've got Meraki kits, you can easily link those two pieces together.

Talos receives so much traffic. I did one of the sessions yesterday with the guys from Talos, and the amount of web traffic that comes into Talos for them to analyze is huge. So, as a repository of what's going on and a view of what's going on the Internet with this new malware, they're very quickly going to be able to react to that. Even with just the behavioral type analysis in terms of what constitutes bad behavior on a network, they can very quickly analyze and deploy a new solution. They update things like Umbrella, and as a central repository, it feeds into Talos, and then Talos can inform the rest of the security community about what's going on and what things you might need to block, so Talos overall has a positive effect for our clients. For them to do it themselves would be impossible. You need somebody on the Internet, and Talos provide that service. It's about control and visibility, and those certainly are the features that Talos can bring to the table.

I'd rate Umbrella a solid nine out of ten. It's probably difficult to get any product in a 10, but they are always constantly developing it. So, if you come back in a year's time, there'll always be new features than what's available today.