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Cisco Umbrella

Score8.7 out of 10

267 Reviews and Ratings

What is Cisco Umbrella?

Cisco now offers OpenDNS Umbrella Web Filtering. Cisco acquired OpenDNS in August 2015, and rebranded the product as Cisco Umbrella.

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Who Buys & Uses Cisco Umbrella

Cisco Umbrella Reviews

What users are saying about Cisco Umbrella.
View all Cisco Umbrella reviews

Pros

  • Effective blocking of malicious web content and phishing attempts
  • Straightforward setup and seamless policy management
  • Strong DNS security and malware protection capabilities

Cons

  • Limited granularity for policy management and specific rule creation
  • Complexity in understanding policy order and advanced configurations
  • Inconsistent domain categorization leading to false positives or negatives

Cisco Umbrella

Incentivized
Robert RogersView profile
Senior IT Systems Analyst in Information Technology at Kalamazoo County Government (501-1000 employees)

Use Cases and Deployment Scope

We are using it to protect our entire organization. We use it to deny access to mal-domains CNC fishing, etc. Filter non business related sites, I especially like that fact we can block newly registered domains that although it might catch a legit site, most new domains are high risk for malware, or CNC. I have used this in its free form at home as OpenDNS. With proper MS Active directory you can track requests by user. We have the option to integrate into our AnyConnect VPN client as well still working on that.

Pros

  • It is easy to setup and they have very helpful onboarding staff.
  • It took only a few hours to get it up and running.
  • It is updated in Realtime by Cisco Talos Intelligence who are awesome.

Cons

  • It takes a while to get the order of policies figured out.
  • There is a slight delay in changes as it filters down to your client.

Return on Investment

  • Saves time we can have the benefit of almost real time blocking of threats.
  • Helps confirm a PC is compromised, we can now see where it is connecting, out too.
  • Helps to prevent with new domain blocking.

Alternatives Considered

TitanHQ DNS Filtering

Other Software Used

Cisco Catalyst Center, Cisco Secure Endpoint

Safer internet with Cisco Umbrella.

Incentivized
Osman Gani
Project Coordinator in Information Technology at Hamida Traders Ltd (htl-bd.com) (1001-5000 employees)

Use Cases and Deployment Scope

We use Cisco Umbrella for several purposes, one of them is to secure our internet users within our office network. Cisco Umbrella works as a shield for us against cyber threats by blocking access to malicious websites, preventing phishing attacks, and implementing security policies for all the users within our office. It also saves time for us by automatically blocking known cyber threats which help us to focus more on other critical incidents.

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.

Cons

  • The smart search feature in Cisco Umbrella is great addition for sure which helps us to identify malicious domain just by searching the URL and there is scoring system of Cisco Umbrella which mark the URL in low, medium and high risk. Sometimes Cisco Umbrella mark well known and good domain as malicious whether sometimes they mark malicious sites/domain as low risk. So, it's something that they should focus on, I think.
  • The live activity search is great for checking internet activities, but the filtering options could be improved. It would be helpful if we could filter by multiple parameters at once like combining username, destination IP and time range.

Return on Investment

  • It's a costly product and we have to admit that, but security breaches are costlier, and they can take more than we can afford so we always had positive mindset over our security purchase and Cisco Umbrella had overall positive impact.

Alternatives Considered

Cisco AnyConnect

Other Software Used

Cisco Catalyst Switches, Cisco AnyConnect

Cisco Umbrella as Cloud Security Service for SD-WAN Edge Routers

Incentivized
Adnan TanveerView profile
Network Engineer in Engineering at Telstra (10,001+ employees)

Use Cases and Deployment Scope

We are using Cisco Umbrella to integrate with SD-WAN Edge devices to provide cloud based security. This helps us to layoff the security analysis and logs storage responsibilities from the SD-WAN Edge routers. One use-case of Cisco Umbrella usage is to integrate using manual IPSEC Tunnels and the other use-case is to implement auto IPSEC tunnels using APIs. The third use-case of using Cisco Umbrella is for a DNS Security where the internet bound traffic is routed towards Cisco Umbrella first for the security assessments. Once the device is integrated using any of these use-cases, we can implement the policies from the Umbrella portal for carrying out the desired level of security hardening. In my opinion, Cisco Umbrella is a pretty cool cloud based security service that can help enterprises to meet their cyber readiness and security compliance.

Pros

  • DNS Security
  • Auto SIG Tunnels
  • Web Filtering
  • Operation Logs

Cons

  • Use of new APIs for auto SIG Tunnels is not working
  • The Cisco Umbrella logs on vManage are not displaying the detailed information
  • Would be better if the umbrella portal is integrated within the SD-WAN Manager.

Return on Investment

  • Security compliance
  • Use of less expansive routers even with low disk space

Alternatives Considered

Zscaler Internet Access and Palo Alto Networks Prisma Cloud

Other Software Used

Cisco Catalyst SD-WAN, Cisco IOS, Cisco Catalyst 8000 Edge Platforms

An important product for securing information

Incentivized
Vesa JordanView profile
CTO at Finnfund in Information Technology at Finnfund (51-200 employees)

Use Cases and Deployment Scope

Our business needs a reliable security solution to ensure business continuity. We use Cisco Umbrella primarily to secure our staff's web browsing and prevent them from going to malicious sites. We need to be able to protect company workstations against malware. We also use other tools to maintain a high level of security by creating a multi-layered firewall.

Pros

  • Protect web surfing
  • User behavior
  • Easy to use
  • Modern layout

Cons

  • Giving trough email more information
  • Get more information blocked sites

Return on Investment

  • ROI has been excellent
  • There is no service breaks
  • Protection works well
  • Easy to use

Other Software Used

Microsoft Defender for Endpoint, Microsoft Dynamics 365, Microsoft 365

Great extra security layer for your remote workers

Incentivized
Carlos Coque
System Administrator in Information Technology at IBEX Payroll Services (11-50 employees)

Use Cases and Deployment Scope

We started using the Cisco Umbrella way before the pandemics as an extra security layer to protect computers working within our internal network. That had been working really well and it's proven even more important after we had to buy laptops and send people to work from home, where we have much less control over the environment security.

Pros

  • Protect against various types of malware
  • Allow custom policy creation
  • Allows endpoint centralized management
  • Shows graphs with usage statistics

Cons

  • More intuitive administrator interface
  • AD integration is a bit complicated
  • Better pricing

Return on Investment

  • Users felt more confident and productive
  • Support had less security incidents

Alternatives Considered

Cisco Meraki MR

Other Software Used

Comodo Advanced Endpoint Protection (AEP), Malwarebytes

Usability

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