Cisco Secure Connect is a SASE solution that converges Software-Defined Wide Area Network (SD-WAN) and Security Service Edge (SSE) to enable operational consistency across premises to the cloud.
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Cisco Umbrella
Score 8.9 out of 10
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Cisco now offers OpenDNS Umbrella Web Filtering. Cisco acquired OpenDNS in August 2015, and rebranded the product as Cisco Umbrella.
Cisco Secure Connect allows for secure connections to critical systems with a better performance while maintaining security for users and business processes, maintaining the company policies and security posture for improved end user experience without impact on the services. …
Enterprise with Hybrid Workers or remote workers where most of the resources are in cloud. Branches spread around the worlds with private DCs. Enterprise with mpls or sd-wan connection, the Cisco Secure Connect technology is a further technology upgrade from SD-WAN. Central management of l3/l4 policies, DNS filtering and Web Filtering based on the identity.
When a company has a distributed workforce, the produce works very well to unify a set of policies to apply against web bound traffic. Areas we have struggled with is getting value out of our cloud delivered firewall due to requirements to fully use it
I think it integrates very well with Meraki, and that's the best thing I like about this product. Meraki is all about simplicity, and when a customer has the same user interface to get their network and security experience just right out of the Meraki dashboard, it really works. Very great. For example, if you want to secure the internet user, you want to use any, sorry, you want to secure any application, you want to secure any brand, it's just a matter of minutes. You can do it.
As many companies think—they’re afraid of firewalls, but they want to keep something secure—and what it does best is it simplifies the approach from a cybersecurity perspective, especially from the user perspective. Users spend a lot of time on the web, trying to access sites, clicking links, scanning QR codes, and doing whatever. You can’t really stop them unless you have something in between that can check whether those links lead somewhere safe, or potentially run them in a sandbox if there are threats or specific use cases.
So I think one of its strongest points is that it’s very simple, and it’s not expensive compared to if you buy a firewall and licenses from other brands, where you have to configure it and spend engineer work hours or outsource the work. It’s the simplicity, and I think it just works. I had some issues five years ago, four years ago, but now it just works. I’m pretty happy.
For teams which are growing, it is very costly to purchase the capabilities that protects the business and even identifying the right subscription like advance threat protection.
The one who does not have any advance or high level Cisco Secure Connect experience, for them it is hard to use the Cisco Secure Connect UI. So, you should make the UI quite extra user friendly.
Finding the root cause is very tricky for large datasets.
Third party integrations are also not that easy with Cisco.
So we had in the past very general rule sets, very detailed rule sets for security rules. Like you can access this page but not this IP range and so on. So hundreds of specific rules for specific machines and the rule management in Cisco Umbrella is not that granular. So it was not possible to build up these rule sets in Cisco Umbrella, but now we see to access it's much better already. So that's why one reason why we are migrating to CQ access to have better API based possibility to manage these rule sets and synchronize them between different products that we are using and in the cloud. So yeah, we hope that with secure access it's a little bit more granular like with Cisco Umbrella currently.
The product is mature. The product support well all 3 main OS (Windows, Linux, MacOS). Cisco Support is great Cisco backends are powerfull appliance Cisco secure profile are a great feature and because they are controlled centraly, there is less way to bypass the VPN. Cisco SEcure connect is really easy-to-use for non computer expert.
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.
I gave this rating because it delivers the strongly on things that matters the most to our business like security, reliability and better user experience. It provides the secure access policies and it supports the MFA which reduces the risk. We can securely work from anywhere without any trouble also it supports both on prem and cloud access.
Better features and easy to manage system with great customer support and overall usability is great as it works for hybrid environment with ease as it is having features for on prem users as wells as cloud users with great customer support and great team of trained engineers to support our opeartions.
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
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
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)
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.
Very quick and easy, its a tidy set up, no messy cables and the sound and video quality is excellent. I use this weekly for home calls and larger team calls across the UK and Europe and have no problems. The engineers were in and out within a couple of hours
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.
Cisco Secure Connect allows for secure connections to critical systems with a better performance while maintaining security for users and business processes, maintaining the company policies and security posture for improved end user experience without impact on the services. Better tool tested when considering technical requirements and security posture requirements.
Umbrella checked all the boxes for us (at the time) because it supported multiple domains and multiple IPs to protect (we have 20+ offices), and its configuration and policies cover a lot of different options for us. We used another product prior, and it worked well, but it didn't have all the features we needed at the time.
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
The positive impact is that businesses has reduced the dependency on physical hardware by moving and adapting its cloud services and on-prem security.
Due to the centralized management, it is easy for developer like us to manage the dashboard and also reduces the time spent on security task and routine networks.
Cisco Secure Connect is providing a strong ROI because it reduces infrastructure cists, improved IT tasks, enhances security which is very beneficial for long term businesses.
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.
