Cisco Umbrella Reviews

We use Cisco Umbrella for DNS security. We also have the roaming clients deployed on user laptops.

We use it for roaming clients. We also push all our DNS traffic to Umbrella. We do not allow any other DNS traffic. That is kind of how we have fully implemented Umbrella.

We were looking to bridge the gap for DNS security, especially for mobile clients. We wanted to be able to put that roaming client on their PCs and kind of bring that together.

It has improved our organization from a security posture perspective. We feel more confident now knowing that we can block phishing attempts or any type of malware that is DNS-related. This is a very nice feature that provides peace of mind.

Umbrella has absolutely helped us remediate threats more quickly. In fact, it has blocked a lot of threats that may have been able to go through in some instances. Knowing that they are blocking it and being able to find the PC that potentially has the threat on it, that has been very beneficial.

Umbrella has been very good for employee morale. It makes our job a little bit easier.

Cybersecurity resilience is very important for our organization right now. Umbrella does a good job of blocking ransomware, malware, bad threat actors, and phishing attempts.

Being able to control policy sets has been a very nice feature. Being able to have appliances that are separate, where we can send DNS traffic, has been very beneficial as well.

It is a good product for helping workers feel safe, secure, supported, and included. Having the roaming client is probably one of the key factors in being able to do that.

Cisco Umbrella provides single-pane-of-glass management, which is pretty important for my organization. We have a lot of products, including security products, that we manage. Being able to see a lot of those data sets in a single pane of glass is very beneficial for my team. We enjoy having it. It is very easy to use.

It is not very difficult to maintain network connectivity. 

We would like them to add more features to Cisco Umbrella.

We have been using Umbrella for about four years.

Stability has been great. Obviously, there have been some hiccups here and there on the connectivity side. That is out of our control, but it is understandable, as things are in the cloud. I have had more issues with Amazon than I have had issues with Umbrella, where I have had a very good experience.

It is very scalable. If I had more sites, all I would have to do is deploy more VMs and point traffic that way, which is very nice.

We are using roaming clients. We are also using the DNS appliances that we have deployed. I have over 15,000 users and 10 locations. We have deployed each appliance at every location, and then point traffic to that. There are 20 different servers that we are using for Umbrella.

The technical support has been very good. I have not had to open many tickets. I have only opened two in the five years that we have had it. Those two times, the support was very nice and supportive. I would rate them as 10 out of 10.

We have actually been using Umbrella since it came out. Previously, we just ran our own DNS. From a security product perspective, Umbrella has been the only DNS solution that we've used.

The initial setup is very straightforward. There is a lot of documentation available.

It was deployed in-house.

We have seen ROI. We can show our leadership that we are blocking and preventing things from coming into our network. Not only that, but from a threat perspective, if any of those things were able to infiltrate, then possibly the remediation damages would be way more than the cost that I am paying for Umbrella today.

As an educational partner, we get better licensing structures. We are very happy with that. It has been very nice that Cisco has partnered with the educational sector to bring that. 

Look for all the gaps that you have in your network, then try to find a product that is more rounded to essentially fill those gaps.

I would rate Umbrella as 10 out of 10.

We were looking to solve multiple challenges, from DLP all the way through to regular content filtering offsite for our hybrid and remote employees.

Using Cisco Umbrella has brought us into compliance with our customers on a number of points.

Also, it's very important that the solution helps support hybrid work. That was one of the main reasons we got it. About 45 to 50 percent of our employees are either fully remote or hybrid. We needed a solution that would follow them home.

In addition, it's very helpful for securing infrastructure from end to end and detecting threats. It's blocking a lot of stuff, so we don't even have to remediate. It's blocking things before they get to us.

Resilience in cyber security is very helpful and this product has increased our security posture quite a bit.

The most valuable features for us include

• Tenant lock
• Content filtering 
• DLP solutions, looking for PII and information being exfiltrated.

Also, the policies are applied wherever you go, and that's good.

There are a couple of different pieces that have different portals. I know they're working on getting them all into one portal, but that's probably the biggest thing that needs improvement right now. It's not a single pane of glass yet.

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

We haven't had any issues with the stability of the product.

The scalability is very good and that's another one of the reasons that we chose this product. You can slowly ramp up the policies. You don't have to build it all at once. We started small and have been deploying more and more of the features of the full SIG Essentials package that we have. We can add more users when need be. It scales on a policy and a user and a deployment basis.

We have about 400 end-users and five sites. We use the AnyConnect module on the local workstations.

The solution's technical support has been very good. I haven't had to call them very much, but the technical support has been good when I have needed it.

Neutral

Previously, our users were only in-house and we had internal firewalls that were doing a lot of this work. But now that they're hybrid, we had to come up with a new solution.

We evaluated Prisma because we have Palo Alto firewalls, but it was more expensive and more difficult to set up.

I don't think our workers like it all that much. It has actually made employee morale worse because we block a lot of stuff. But that's not really the product's fault. It's our policy. It makes things a little bit more cumbersome for them, but it definitely makes us feel safer.

I would tell leaders who want to build more resilience within their workplaces to do it. It's important because one hack and your business is done. Your reputation is everything in this day and age. Being resilient and being able to recover from that type of stuff before you're actually exfiltrated is a big deal.

Overall, Cisco Umbrella is pretty easy to use, pretty easy to deploy, and it does what we want it to do.

One of our purposes for acquiring Umbrella was to block phishing links that we get in emails and to manage risky websites. We're using it for our internal network and the roaming client for external users.

Blocking malicious websites and preventing users from going into them, as well as the phishing attacks that usually come with malicious links, were the challenges. With Umbrella we can block them.

We use it in our Active Directory domain and for about 175 users. We use it on desktop computers and on laptops for external users. It's all on-premises, protecting servers and workstations.

It has improved our company a lot because we now see where the users are going and prevent them from going to malicious websites. It has reduced, by a lot, the chances of hackers getting into our organization.

With Umbrella, it's our IT staff who we feel secure. Sometimes the end-users, our clients, don't fully understand the purpose of the tools when we install them, such as the roaming client. And sometimes they get false positives and they don't fully understand why. But for us, as IT admins, we feel a lot more comfortable with the tool in place, because we know that it's unlikely our users will go to a malicious website. Umbrella is protecting us.

Umbrella has also helped us remediate threats more quickly. It's really good for securing our infrastructure from end to end. Umbrella's footprint is really small. If you want to secure infrastructure, such as servers, you don't have to install an agent. You just have to use DNS forwarders and point them to the umbrella servers. That's easier. It helps us protect our infrastructure for sure.

The Global Block List is one of the most valuable features because it's really easy to block domain names as well as URLs. Sometimes you don't want to block the whole site, you just want to block one URL. The Global Block and Allow Lists are the best features for us.

Cisco Umbrella also provides a single pane of glass for management. It's really helpful and it's important for us because we have multiple locations. Without a single pane of glass, if you want to block websites you have to go to every location, in each firewall, one by one. But when you have a single management portal, it's a lot easier.

The user experience is good because, as IT and admins, it's easy to use. But that's not only for admins, it's also true for the clients because they know the reason a website is blocked. The user experience is pretty smooth because they can report a false positive or a malicious website that has not been blocked in Umbrella. We are happy with the user experience.

And when it comes to applying and maintaining network connectivity consistently across all workplaces, Umbrella is excellent. We can track, among the different locations that we have, where the users are trying to get to. That means the risk of disruption is reduced by using Umbrella. And in that way, Umbrella contributes to maintaining network connectivity.

The user interface is pretty nice. Once you know how to do tasks, it's easy.

There are some situations where we would like to block things for specific user groups. I know that Umbrella does that, but it's not that easy. When you go to the Global Allow and Block Lists, that's the easy part. But when you want a specific task for specific rules and policies for user groups, you have to go three levels down in the menu, and it's hard to find where you do that task.

Also, the policies are not that easy to manage.

I have been using Cisco Umbrella for around a year and a half.

The stability is really good. They have about 99.99 percent uptime. I can't think of a significant disruption in the service.

We are a small organization, but from what I have seen, it is very scalable.

We have never requested support.

The initial deployment was straightforward.

The solution is on-premises but the management is cloud-based.

We did it all by ourselves.

We have seen return on investment by reducing the risk we had in the past. That has saved us from having to invest a lot of time in support, which is something we had to do when a user didn't know what they were doing and got infected. We now spend less time on end-user support.

The pricing is pretty fair. It's good.

In my former company, we used Area 1 for DNS protection, not Umbrella. I knew OpenDNS before it became Umbrella. In fact, I used OpenDNS for my personal accounts. In my current company we evaluated Area 1, but in the end, we loved Cisco's support and that is one of the reasons we went with Umbrella. But, obviously, the features in Umbrella are pretty good.

Once our end-users understood why we use Umbrella, that it was for improving our organization's security, it improved their morale. Nowadays, they are aware of cyber threats and they know that Umbrella is one of the tools that we use to prevent a breach. They feel more secure now.

Resilience helps a lot in cyber security. One of the things that makes Umbrella great is that you don't have to detect threats by yourself. Wherever in the world a new threat is detected, it's in the Global Block List of Umbrella and we don't have to manage those threats one by one.

That kind of resilience is more and more important for our organization every day. Fortunately, our C-level now understands the risks and what the organization could lose. They understand the impact. With the support of management, cyber security is really important for our organization.

I would tell the leaders of other organizations who want to build more resilience that cyber security is more important now because we are serving our internal and external customers. The problem with a cyber security risk, a threat or a disruption in IT services, is that it will probably cause us to stop producing what we produce. Our customers will have a bad experience, and that means it is not only a financial issue but one of reputation. I would tell such leaders to always keep cyber security in mind because it's not just about your IT guys, it's for the whole organization.

It's an excellent product. It has worked really well. The only reason I don't give it a 10 out of 10 is, as I mentioned, that there are some tasks that could be done more easily.

In general, we use it for the security of our network.

We wanted to get an idea of what's happening outside of our network and what's coming to our network. We had no way to know before and we were just sitting there waiting for something to happen. At least now we can be proactive.

It has helped us to be more secure. Cisco Umbrella allows us to see threats in real time. We can also see if there are any bad actors inside of our network who are trying to do malicious things. It gives us a quick glance at the situation, at where we are and how vulnerable we are.

Another definite benefit is that it has helped us to remediate threats more quickly.

It's very important that the solution helps support hybrid work. In the past, we might have had one or two people who were working from home because of illness or pregnancy. Now, with 60 percent of our people working from home, Cisco Umbrella has really helped us out with threats that they might not even know exist on their side. We can monitor them and be proactive about them.

Also, if it didn't have a single pane of glass, we would not be using it. The single pane of glass gives you a one-stop shop. It's like going to Home Depot. You find all your stuff there. You can see all your threats and your endpoints. It's a very important feature and makes things very simple.

Another point is that it's very easy to maintain network connectivity.

I have been using Cisco Umbrella for about eight years.

The stability of Cisco Umbrella is very good.

I haven't had to scale it, but I would assume the scalability would be good.

We haven't contacted them from the time we were up and running.

We did not have a previous solution.

The deployment was straightforward.

I used an integrator, Harness LLC, and the experience with them was all good.

Our ROI is due to the level of threats that we don't have to deal with, threats that are being blocked by Cisco Umbrella.

There is room for improvement when it comes to the cost.

We looked at Trend Micro, but that was several years ago.

Look for programs that have a track record and that are proven. No matter what any individual might say, that person can't do it by themselves. They have to have support, and Cisco Umbrella is a good support.

Resilience in cyber security is like raising kids. You really can't stop. You have to be resilient continually. Every day is a different challenge. Just because you're good on Tuesday doesn't mean you're going to be good on Wednesday.
Cyber security resilience has been key for us, with people going home to work or to other places to do their jobs. That resilience keeps them working and keeps our network safe.

I love it. It's almost like trying to look at WiFi. You can't see the WiFi signal with your naked eye. It's the same with threats. You can't see them by just walking around the building. With a tool like Cisco Umbrella, you can see what you have and how to fix it.

For our employees, it means that their systems are working. They have no idea what we're doing behind the scenes to keep their systems working, unfortunately. I wish I could say, "Hey, guys, today Cisco Umbrella stopped 84 threats."

We use Cisco Umbrella to secure our gateway. All of the DNS forwarding coming out of the company from any site or all the DNS requests are forwarded through Cisco Umbrella, and then they determine if that is a safe address and if the content coming back is safe. They will either reject the addressing out of hand, or they'll look at the Layer 7 content and reject that from making it back to us.

We are using the Secure Internet Gateway (SIG) Advantage package. In terms of deployment, effectively, it's deployed from our private cloud. It's in our data closet on our servers.

It enables us to finally allow laptops to be used as workstations and allow data to leave the building. In the past, laptops were only used for VPN access, but they would connect back to their data inside the company. This has allowed us to have a level of confidence that they're protected as if they were behind our firewall. So, now, we've got work-from-home people who literally have their workstations with them.

We have six sites with 60 to 70 users. The baseline configuration allows for additional protection for any DNS requests as they leave those sites, and then the secondary policy is for the mobile devices as they leave the premises. When they're connected to public WiFi, they have an additional policy that kicks in for that time that they're not connected back to the company. So, when they're on public WiFi without a VPN, the tool will actually put that second policy in place that's more aggressive and offers a higher level of protection when it's not sitting behind the firewall. All that is automated. It's all built into the agent.

We don't allow WiFi inside of our network for connection to our actual business network. As soon as a device is docked, it disables WiFi on that mobile device.

When we have laptops that leave the building, they could connect to public WiFi before they establish a VPN connection back into the company. For that duration or that period of time when they're not docked in the network or on a VPN, they effectively don't have that full layer of security that I provide inside the building. This tool stands in during that period of time, and we extend the security settings through their basic firewall or their cloud-based firewall at that time. So, we do content filtering and control access, but they also are looking at new domains, IP addresses, and bad requests. They're blocking them on my behalf when a laptop is not sitting behind our security appliances.

There are a couple of interface issues. I know that they say that there are feature enhancements that are noted. For example, we've got the Cisco Meraki security appliances, and there, we geofence our company to where we're allowed to send and receive traffic. So, in our case, by default, we only allow traffic to six different countries, which allows us to effectively prevent traffic for the majority of bad players in the world, but they don't give you an easy way to do that in Cisco Umbrella. With Cisco Meraki, I can specify or pick the countries. I can say that I want to only allow traffic from these six countries, and I'm done. With Cisco Umbrella, I have to rely on the fact that they're going to prevent traffic to other countries. They're going to decide if it's good or bad. I can't geofence out. I can plot top-level domains, but .com and .net go global. I can certainly block a China (CN) or a Russia (RU) domain, but that doesn't give me the same level of granularity. 

Apparently, Cisco Umbrella has got that as a feature request to allow an administrator to say, "I specifically only want traffic to and from these countries. Everything else should be dumped." That way, when they're sitting behind my network or they go out in the wild, they have that same level of traffic being blocked.

I have been using it for 14 to 15 years.

We've had no issues. It has done exactly what it's supposed to do.

It is cloud-based. So, scalability should not be an issue. 

Any increase in its usage is all relative to the growth of our staff. Currently, we deploy the laptops for people who need to work from home or are traveling between the banks. That's roughly about 20% of our total staff. Some people aren't going to be working from home, and some of their jobs can't be done from home. They have no need for mobile devices. If there is a need to work from home, its usage will increase. It is there if we need it to scale, but at this point, it is not scheduled to change.

Once I became a paying customer, it was much better. The preliminary training is there, but when you get into the nuances and the details of some of its capabilities, you need to talk to tech support. Once you're a paid customer, you get direct access, and then it's good. When I'm able to get a hold of them, their technical support is a 10 out of 10.

Positive

I didn't use any similar solution previously. 

I was a hundred percent involved in its deployment. We had a couple of issues. The proof of concept was done without a lot of planning. So, there were some mistakes made along the way. If I was doing it again the second time, I wouldn't make the same mistakes. 

The default configurations have your baselines. Those are never supposed to get changed, and I changed and tweaked those for our proof of concept. After a couple of weeks, I had some additional guidance from the Cisco Umbrella team. You leave the baseline configuration, and then you clone and create a new configuration that sits in front of it. So, everyone gets the baseline, and you don't change that. If you want to change it, you make a new policy and then make the changes to that. If you change the baseline default policy and you make a mistake in it, you've to back that all out. If you make it in the new policy, in the worst case, you just delete it, and automatically everyone goes back to baseline. So, there's still a policy in effect. That was a training issue that should have been resolved. Now that I've done it, if somebody asks me, I would say that this is the way you've got to do it.

It was just me taking care of its deployment. In terms of maintenance, once it's configured, unless you're retweaking and adding or removing something that was blocked, it pretty much runs itself.

I have less maintenance to resolve, fix, and reconfigure VPN clients personally, and the feedback from the end-users is that they're more productive.

We were using the free version, and we implemented the paid version about two months ago.

I'm paying a fair price, but everything is negotiable with Cisco. One of the benefits that I got by having Cisco Umbrella is the licensing of the Cisco AnyConnect VPN client. There has always been an issue for years and years with Cisco Meraki in terms of VPN clients and using the native built-in Windows client. It keeps reconfiguring itself. By using Cisco AnyConnect as the VPN client, it's not affected by Windows patching or people typing in passwords by mistake. It's more resilient and doesn't change. With just Meraki solution, there was an extra expense for the Cisco AnyConnect VPN client. By having Cisco Umbrella, that licensing is now included.

There were a couple of other options, and I discussed them with another consultant. As a regulated industry, we have to do vendor management, and vendors have to be vetted. So, Cisco was already a vetted vendor. There are other companies that do the same thing, but Cisco didn't require me to do any more vetting. They were already a vendor.

When it's configured the way it's supposed to work, it turns itself on and off based on the status of the VPN or the dock condition. Once it's configured, it does exactly what it's supposed to do. 

If you're doing a proof of concept on it, fully understand how the policies are configured and what the flow is. You should understand the hierarchical status of the policies to configure it right the first time. You don't really want to guess it.

I would rate it a 10 out of 10.

Our primary use case for Cisco Umbrella is for content filtering and for different access lists. We have different lists for different departments of what they can access.

It makes it really easy to accomplish content filtering. We don't have to do a lot of customization. You just click the box for the content category and it's up to date. 

This ability is very important to my organization because we're in the financial sector and security is at a premium. 

Cisco Umbrella is pretty straightforward and simple to use. We recently did social media blocking and it was really easy for our marketing department to access it. It's pretty straightforward. 

It helped free up IT staff for other projects. It saves us a lot of time by blocking potential breaches. It's very reliable.

Umbrella has definitely helped us improve our cybersecurity resilience by blocking malicious links and adware.

I would like for them to continue building on IPS and IDS functionalities. 

We have been using Cisco Umbrella for five years. 

It's been very reliable. I haven't had any issues with it. 

The scalability is easy. It's deployed through group policies. 

We're a Cisco shop. We have a lot of their products.

We have seen ROI through its pop-up blocking. 

We hope that Cisco will help us consolidate tools more than it is now by incorporating more IPS and IDS functionality. 

My advice to someone considering Cisco Umbrella would be to focus on how easy is to use the GUI and how easy it is to navigate. You pretty much just click a box and the content categories work. 

I would rate Cisco Umbrella a ten out of ten. 

If your needs vary by department, I would advise making different groups for different departments. It's easier to do it that way than to set it up and go back to tie it to different AV groups. 

Our primary use case is for filtering and security reasons. We send our DNS queries to Umbrella. It will see if we go to a site that has malware or a virus and it will stop it. It detects if the URL has malware.

The multilayers of defense have improved my organization. We have a lot of defensive layers and DNS queries from Cisco is one of them. 

The most valuable feature is its ability to detect if a URL has malware or is vulnerable.  

I would like for their support to be faster. 

We have been using Cisco Umbrella for six to seven years. 

I have never experienced a stability issue where the site went down. 

I would rate the scalability a ten out of ten. 

Support doesn't always get back to me right away but they'll send me an email with the solution. It's not critical. I don't have an issue with it. I would rate their support an eight out of ten. I took two points off because it can take a day or two for them to get back to me. 

Positive

The initial setup is easy. There is good documentation. I can deploy it within a day or two. There's a page that shows you the health of the agent. It makes me more comfortable knowing that my configuration is healthy. 

I did the deployment myself. 

We have definitely realized ROI through the protection Umbrella offers. 

The pricing is decent. The price is user-based, per month. 

I would rate Cisco Umbrella a nine out of ten. I also use it on a personal level. It helps me to protect my endpoints so that they won't go to a malicious site. 

I'm doing business for customers. I'm building customer networks. We have Cisco Umbrella and Cisco Secure Endpoint, and the use case is that we connect to the company network from all over the place, and we need to do it in a secure way. 

We are just a small company with about 300 employees. Everybody is using these products to securely connect to the corporate network. From there, we support our customers. It needs to be really secure so that no security problems spread from our network to the customers' network. This is something we absolutely need to avoid. That's why these products are really good for us.

For me, it's quite good for daily work. Mainly, I work from a home office, so I have it running all day. It's okay for me. There is not much noise about it. I don't need to pay a lot of attention to this. It's just running in the background, and that's what I need.

It enables mobile work from anywhere. If you are at home, at a customer, or traveling, it enables a secure way of accessing the corporate network.

As a user, everything is there for securing our infrastructure from end to end to detect and remediate threats. There's nothing else that I need.

It saves time for sure. It doesn't require much attention. Everybody can use it. The end-users don't need to have any special skills. It's just perfect. I don't have the metrics on time savings because it isn't easy to know how much time you would have spent if you had an unstable product or if you had to take care of all this. 

For me, it's important that I get a connection to my corporate network in a secure and fast way. This product just runs in the background and doesn't need any attention. For me, as a user, it's perfect. 

Overall, I'm quite happy with Cisco products, but there could be one place where you can check what's going on. There could be one place where you get all the information about these products so that you don't need to look around. You get the status, information about what lately happened, and if there was anything on the machine in one single place.

We've been using Cisco Umbrella for about a year and a half, and we've been using Cisco Secure Endpoint for somewhat longer. It has been about three years.

I haven't been in touch with them because it's just working.

We used other products such as separate virus scanners. Using all the products from Cisco simplified things. You don't need to worry about whether it's compatible or whether you need to do something special on the antivirus side. It simplified things for me.

I work for customers, and this was set up by our internal IT department. 

I would advise seriously looking into it because, for our users, it's just working perfectly. 

I would rate it a 10 out of 10. There are no complaints.

We use it for DNS security.

It is deployed on the Umbrella cloud dashboard.

Cisco Umbrella helped to improve security by detecting and prohibiting threats.

I like the API. I also like the way Cisco Umbrella uses DNS to block malicious sites before they are opened.

Its general ability to detect and remediate threats is quite good.

The documentation is good, and we have been able to resolve any issues ourselves.

It would be good to have more extensions to third-party products and a client for other device types.

We've been working with Cisco Umbrella for four years.

I have not had any issues with stability.

The initial setup is very easy.

The price is fair, and the licensing cost is based on the number of users. We have seen a good ROI.

Overall, on a scale from one to ten, with ten being the very best, I'd rate Cisco Umbrella at nine.

Our clients use Cisco Umbrella compared with SD-WAN or Meraki solutions. They use layer 7 firewall and web proxy in most use cases and fewer DNS security functionalities.

Cisco Umbrella has replaced on-premises firewalls in our client's branches. Our client had one central cloud solution, and now, they no longer need the local firewall.

Our clients have found that Cisco Umbrella increases its security posture because there is a central policy that fits everything.

Though Cisco Talos is usually part of the backend, it is mandatory to have a good solution.

We've been implementing Cisco Umbrella for three years.

I have not seen any issues with scalability.

Cisco's technical support is pretty good. When a solution is available, they will find it. On a scale from one to ten with ten being the best, I'd rate Cisco's technical support at nine.

Positive

We sell both Cisco and Zscaler. If the client already has a Cisco solution, then Umbrella is usually a better fit. In cases when a customer already uses Zscaler, has another SD-WAN solution, or has a different vendor, Zscaler may be the first choice.

As a Cisco Secure reseller, we bring value to our customers through our technicians and engineers who consult with them and implement the solution. This is a benefit from our partner side.

The initial deployment is quite easy. It's internal, and with a few clicks, Cisco Umbrella can be up and running.

Cisco should make the solution cheaper.

The locks and management could be better. The product is fairly new, and it may take some time to get all the features up and running.

Overall, I would rate Cisco Umbrella an eight on a scale from one to ten.