Cisco Secure Web Appliance (formerly Cisco WSA) vs Cisco Umbrella | TrustRadius

What users are saying about

Score 7.7 out of 10

Based on 25 reviews and ratings

Score 8.5 out of 10

Based on 106 reviews and ratings

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Pros

SMA gave us central control over multiple servers, simplifying management.
Performance of the Appliance VM exceeded that of our old physical appliance-based solution.
Convenient licensing for virtualized environments that allows easy scaling.

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Verified User

Engineer in Information Technology

Libraries Company, 1001-5000 employees

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Filters content at the DNS level. Makes it a little harder for the sneaky ones to make it through.
Since this is at the DNS level, using their DNS servers (as a forwarder to your local DNS) it is extremely fast. Transparent.
Always being updated. Not dependent on "definitions" or algorithms - a site is either blacklisted or whitelisted.
Easy to implement, apply, maintain

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Director of IT

BLDD ARCHITECTS INCArchitecture & Planning, 51-200 employees

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Cons

The default metrics on the dashboard visualization are not that useful. It is not much customizable too. Some of the dashboard features like load, volume, etc. can have a hide option.
The false negatives are more than false positives. A lot of the times, it verdicts the same email as malicious and non-malicious. This can be reduced.

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Security Analyst Graduate Intern

University of Colorado DenverHigher Education, 5001-10,000 employees

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Keeping up to date on known malicious sites and blocking those is difficult for all vendors, but this could always be improved upon.
A more detailed descriptions of what is included the Security Categories would be useful. Generic descriptions are provided. For example, state lottery sites could be detailed in the description of the Gambling category.

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IT Security Manager

Reynolds, Smith and Hills (RS&H)Design, 1001-5000 employees

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Likelihood to Renew

No score

No answers yet

No answers on this topic

Cisco Umbrella 10.0

Based on 3 answers

It is a great product. It is easy to manage and is affordable. We are a Cisco shop, so it is easily integrated with our other security suite of products to include Threat Response and SecureX.

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IT Security Manager

Reynolds, Smith and Hills (RS&H)Design, 1001-5000 employees

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Usability

Cisco Secure Web Appliance (formerly Cisco WSA) 9.0

Based on 1 answer

Because it's one of those products you almost don't realize it exists from the end user. From the administrator perspective, you can do everything on its web interface and it's very intuitive to manage, once you know the concepts behind identities, acls, etc. Also, once you build the control structure, I mean, you link 'local' groups with your own Active Directory groups, as we did here, you don't need to be managing those things on the appliance itself.

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IT Infrastructure Specialist

RANDON S.AAutomotive, 5001-10,000 employees

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Cisco Umbrella 9.4

Based on 4 answers

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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IT Security Manager

Reynolds, Smith and Hills (RS&H)Design, 1001-5000 employees

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Support Rating

Cisco Secure Web Appliance (formerly Cisco WSA) 7.0

Based on 4 answers

Our experience with Cisco's support was terrible. Other than the fact that they don't respond to service-related emails with urgency, they also keep on changing the policies that affected us. Recently, they came up with a new look for the same software, which was insanely slow. Renewal of keys for the old interface took months. Overall, the support was not very friendly from the users' point of view.

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Security Analyst Graduate Intern

University of Colorado DenverHigher Education, 5001-10,000 employees

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Cisco Umbrella 8.2

Based on 55 answers

We have been Cisco fans for quite some time. This product / support team lives up to expectations and the high degree of service we have come to expect from them. Whenever we had any sort of question / issue (which there were not many, as this was fairly seamless to integrate) they were responsive and helpful towards finding a solution

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Verified User

General Manager in Corporate

Financial Services Company, 1-10 employees

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Implementation Rating

No score

No answers yet

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Cisco Umbrella 9.0

Based on 2 answers

Overall, the implementation was smooth with little issues. Testing some of the advanced features and ensuring they did not impact our user population was the greatest challenge

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IT Security Manager

Reynolds, Smith and Hills (RS&H)Design, 1001-5000 employees

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Alternatives Considered

At home I have a McAfee service that does similar tasks and helps manage the users of my internet. McAfee seems more user friendly and easier to set exceptions.

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Verified User

Professional in Corporate

Machinery Company, 10,001+ employees

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At the time that we purchased Cisco Umbrella, then OpenDNS, we did not evaluate other products. Since then, several competing products have been released. I intend to evaluate these in the future, as we have not been happy overall with Cisco Umbrella. The unexpected side effects and poor support have been very frustrating.

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Verified User

Manager in Information Technology

Information Technology & Services Company, 11-50 employees

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Return on Investment

Security! Security! Security! We are financial company that work with very sensitive information. A lot of unsafe traffic was blocked on the Cisco IronPort WSA over years of using it. We did not earn on it but absolutely sure that we did not lose 'gazillion' of dollars being infected or scammed.
Easy to configure and use, no need to teach new personnel how work with this product (hopefully saving time = saving money).
Unfortunately the price of license subscription made financial managers push IT dept. to look for something cheaper.

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Valery Mezentsau

System Administrator

Van Ru Credit CorporationFinancial Services, 501-1000 employees

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Saved us lots of technician time dealing w/ Malware and virus issues, I don't think we've had a malware incident this year for example. This was the main reason we bought the product in the first place. We've renewed 2 times because we see the value.
Umbrella helped us reduce the risk of CryptoLocker variants infecting our clients.

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VP Operations

Realtime, LLCInformation Technology and Services, 11-50 employees

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Pricing Details

General

Free Trial

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Free/Freemium Version

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Premium Consulting/Integration Services

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Entry-level set up fee?

No

General

Free Trial

Yes

Free/Freemium Version

Yes

Premium Consulting/Integration Services

Yes

Entry-level set up fee?

No

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