Cisco Umbrella vs. Google Cloud DNS

Overview
ProductRatingMost Used ByProduct SummaryStarting Price
Cisco Umbrella
Score 8.7 out of 10
N/A
Cisco now offers OpenDNS Umbrella Web Filtering. Cisco acquired OpenDNS in August 2015, and rebranded the product as Cisco Umbrella.N/A
Google Cloud DNS
Score 8.9 out of 10
N/A
Google Cloud DNS is a managed DNS service, featuring a global network of anycast servers and touting reliability, availability, and performance.N/A
Pricing
Cisco UmbrellaGoogle Cloud DNS
Editions & Modules
No answers on this topic
No answers on this topic
Offerings
Pricing Offerings
Cisco UmbrellaGoogle Cloud DNS
Free Trial
YesNo
Free/Freemium Version
YesNo
Premium Consulting/Integration Services
NoNo
Entry-level Setup FeeNo setup feeNo setup fee
Additional Details
More Pricing Information
Community Pulse
Cisco UmbrellaGoogle Cloud DNS
Best Alternatives
Cisco UmbrellaGoogle Cloud DNS
Small Businesses

No answers on this topic

Cloudflare
Cloudflare
Score 8.7 out of 10
Medium-sized Companies

No answers on this topic

Cloudflare
Cloudflare
Score 8.7 out of 10
Enterprises
Zscaler Internet Access
Zscaler Internet Access
Score 8.8 out of 10
Amazon Route 53
Amazon Route 53
Score 9.7 out of 10
All AlternativesView all alternativesView all alternatives
User Ratings
Cisco UmbrellaGoogle Cloud DNS
Likelihood to Recommend
8.3
(0 ratings)
9.0
(0 ratings)
Likelihood to Renew
8.0
(0 ratings)
-
(0 ratings)
Usability
8.0
(0 ratings)
9.4
(0 ratings)
Availability
8.7
(0 ratings)
-
(0 ratings)
Performance
8.0
(0 ratings)
-
(0 ratings)
Support Rating
7.0
(0 ratings)
7.5
(0 ratings)
Online Training
8.0
(0 ratings)
-
(0 ratings)
Implementation Rating
9.5
(0 ratings)
-
(0 ratings)
Ease of integration
9.5
(0 ratings)
-
(0 ratings)
Product Scalability
8.0
(0 ratings)
-
(0 ratings)
Vendor post-sale
8.0
(0 ratings)
-
(0 ratings)
Vendor pre-sale
8.0
(0 ratings)
-
(0 ratings)
User Testimonials
Cisco UmbrellaGoogle Cloud DNS
Likelihood to Recommend
It is good for whole network protection, and individual PCs with the client. Provide good reporting on where your network is going on the net. One thing I would like is a longer history with the logs 14 and 30 days are too short some times.
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Google Cloud DNS is well suited in most cases - it has a clean interface, plenty of configuration options, available to view and edit on the Google console.
It may not be as well suited for novice users since the documentation about the various fields is not always available near where the fields need to be set.
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Pros
  • Managing the overall security policies is quite seamless in Cisco Umbrella. it is quite easy to set up and implement web filtering rules and other necessary configurations without any hassle.
  • The reporting features like 'activity search' provides greater visibility of our user's internet activity within our organization. We can identify security related risks quickly and take decisions to mitigate them.
  • The deployment and integration of Cisco Umbrella with other vendors product is quite appreciable. We other non cisco security devices which Cisco Umbrella was integrated with without any major issues.
  • We can easily track down any user that goes to the internet through the activity search feature.
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  • Interface is user friendly
  • It is safe , Secure and reliable
  • It has lower pricing plans
  • They have good customer support
  • They do have good documentation to have fair ideas on their offerings
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Cons
  • There's always room for improvement in all products for sure. On the umbrella part, I would say that the room for improvement is on the data loss prevention part. So it sits on the PCs, it sees a lot of the traffic that goes on, it knows what files are on the PCs, but it's actually not stopping some of the intellectual property or personal identifiable information from going out. So we are able to block users from accessing applications and websites or even IP addresses, but we're not able to go a bit more granular, more on the data loss side. So that's a gap that I have in the product.
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  • It is hard for first time user to get used to it.
  • Support is restricted for 3rd party services who uses it
  • Sometimes the support people take more than 24hrs to reply to our queries, But it is not for all issues.
  • Search function could have been made easy to search records
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Likelihood to Renew
First off I never give anything a "10" unless it's perfect. LOL - I grade on the curve. I think OpenDNS/Umbrella is a very good product. I think that fact that Cisco absorbed them is one of the proofs of that. I have used the product back when it was free for companies our size. I have not always appreciated the cost - but in the post pandemic cyber chaos, I believe the cost benefit ratio is still very high. I have honestly not looked at other products because Umbrella continues to work to my satisfaction. I consider Umbrella to be one of the key layers in my cyber security strategy.
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Usability
The product was easy to install and get running. To maintain the product is also a simple matter of maintaining lists of wanted and unwanted domains or URLs. The basic and advanced security features all do what they are intended to do with no known erroneous outcomes
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This is exceptionally simple to utilize in the event that you are as of now utilizing Google Cloud Services or you are important for the Google Ecosystem as of now. I accept this is likely the primary goal of Google Cloud DNS, to give a more complete set-up of devices to Google Cloud clients. Consequently, I would rate convenience a 9.
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Reliability and Availability
Cisco umbrella services in the cloud are always available. However, the weakness is the VM installed in the data center that are the first resolvers. If the VMs become unavailable for any reason or the vSphere goes down, then all DNS is affected
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Performance
our experience with cisco products has always been awesome and same is the case with cisco umbrella .Under umbrella cisco provides flexible and scalable software solution to use across different dept and sites . These softwares are very user friendly ,pages load quickly as these applications are designed for minimum latency and reports are also provided quickely
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Support Rating
Whilst the support is good once you get through to them, it's email only and the response is slow. This is a issue, because its a core system that needs to work. We have had issues in the past where several of our companies have gone down due to Umbrella and support is nowhere to be seen. It is very difficult to know whether Umbrella is having service issues, since they do not regularly update customers on the status of their services, such as is seen by providers such as Microsoft (status.umbrella.com just seems to show up all of the time, I'm not sure it's even updated)
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In the event that you are utilizing Google Cloud Platform as your cloud supplier, Google Cloud DNS is unquestionably the DNS supplier to utilize.
I haven't required help for it yet, notwithstanding, in my experience, Google Support is incredible.
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Online Training
Quite easy to understand training modules prepared by knowledgeable trainers. Training modules have included all the desired features of these softwares and the content delivery is very good from the respective module trainers and it explains in details the features and apart from that further training material support is also provided if needed.
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Implementation Rating
At the time we were forced to move from Cloud Web Security to Cisco Umbrella, Cisco Umbrella was far from being a direct replacement. It was frustrating and difficult to migrate due to the lack of functionality. This has since been addressed, however we now have legacy rulesets that were built as bandaids that cannot be removed. Hopefully the migration to Secure Access will address this.
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Alternatives Considered
Different products in different spaces. The Z3 was more of a VPN endpoint so that users didn't have to worry about a client. If they are at home, they are on their corporate network and able to access resources. Cisco Umbrella can be used then to serve corporate DNS across the VPN tunnel to the Z3 device and extend the capabilities of Cisco Umbrella.
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Google Cloud is the easiest to use sharing platform available. Other platforms are not as accessible as accessing the Google drive when you are logged in with your Google account. Trello has a limited sharing capacity which I have not experienced with Google Drive. Our institution has afforded us unlimited space on the Google Cloud platform which was more of a struggle to obtain on Dropbox. Teams would select and use Dropbox voluntarily and have to arrange payments and claims. I also find that Dropbox sends a multitude of emails regarding storage and upgrades while Google Cloud is generally silent but highly effective as a storage tool
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Scalability
Cisco umbrella provides fleaxible and scalable software solutions which are easy deploy across multiple departments and sites wherever needed and this softwares are very easy to use and provides the best interface along with cisco support for other devices apart from cisco infrastructure but still there is scope for improvement on the inclusion of latest features
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Return on Investment
  • It's too early for us to say now. We started with Cisco Umbrella with the migration and during the migration we choose all the specific access. Now we are going to Cisco Secure Access in our simulations there will be much of cost savings because we don't need the on-premise data center anymore for the ASARs and for the local firewalls and the people, they are managing that on-premise. So we estimate there will be a lot of cost savings, but currently it's not on the paper yet. So we have to wait what the experience is with it, but we are optimistic.
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  • We use GCP for all our projects so Google Cloud DNS fits perfectly
  • It is proving to scale well so good for us since we are a growing company
  • It is easy to use and doesn't require a separate team to maintain
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ScreenShots