Cisco Umbrella vs. Cloudflare vs. CrowdStrike Falcon

It’s very well suited. From what I’ve seen where it’s installed and tested, it’s actually very well suited in accommodation businesses because people still use VPNs or similar tools when going to hotels, but it helps keep the hotel network itself secure, so malicious actors aren’t doing something there. I’m also thinking for smaller companies—as I mentioned—they have firewalls but don’t want to use them because they’re expensive and hard to configure. So it simplifies the process, and there are smaller licenses where you can protect only access points or only specific users. The flexibility is actually quite good because you can define it for different needs, like specific licenses, add-ons, APIs, and integrations, and so on.

Cloudflare works well as security measure that gives peace of mind without needing to work too hard to get it functioning well. It provides great tools to customize the security experience as well. This is all the same for the caching tools as well. They have a lot of built in tools that make using the caching easy right out of the box, but they provide the customization options to get things just right for your site.

Incentivized

Crowdstrike is a unified platform for monitoring endpoint devices, whether they're workstations, servers, cloud-native machines, or even mobile devices. It uses AI/ML to monitor anomalies and suspicious behavior, including zero-day attacks. It is suitable for large organizations but may be costlier or less appropriate for smaller organizations, those who want an on-prem EDR setup, and those who need custom scanning based on compliance requirements.

Incentivized

• So for example, we had the problem in the past. We are connecting users to our own managed data centers. We had seven locations around the world, put them with Cisco, any connect to our on-prem data center and let them out to the internet. So that's causing some high latency bad experiences with teams and so on. And with Umbrella we can directly connect the user to the cloud and to the internet so the users have a good experience with speed with latency and it's much better than back hauling the traffic to their own company and then processing them there.

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• The best part is the content delivery network. Cloudflare has a large network of data centres around the world that helps cache and delivers content quickly to our customers.
• Cloudflare offers us with a fast and reliable DNS service and with the world class features such as Cloudflare workers, SSL verification, certificate management and web application firewall. When all of these are combined together, it provides very strict security for our organization.
• One of the most important feature that we use is the analytics and threat detection. It provides us with the real time insights of all the threats originating from multiple locations and landing on our websites.

Incentivized

• The Log analysis is very detailed and easy to use.
• Prevent and block all type of malwares.
• Great threat intelligence which is very up-to-date with the recent cyber attacks
• very user friendly in access and management
• Automated feature of detecting, taking action and closing incidents using fusion workflow.

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• 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.

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• In some cases, using Cloudflare can actually lead to slower website speeds if the network is congested or if the website's traffic is particularly heavy.
• Some website owners may find that the level of customization offered by Cloudflare is limited, especially in comparison to other solutions.
• While Cloudflare is easy to set up and manage, it may be too complex for users who are not familiar with web technologies.

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• Support - we are often tasked with running down problems rather than being directed by support.
• The sales staff we have dealt with are not very responsive or timely.
• I believe this is a product built for installations of 300 users or more.

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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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lower cost

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Crowdstrike has a large suite of tools built for helping the engineers triage and respond to security event whenever identified. The ability to customize the security policies and implement more granular policies to different devices based on the functionality is unmatched. Crowdstrike provides so much of ability in a decent budget which ascertains the value for money or ROI.

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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.

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Everything is extremely concise and all settings apply immediately and take effect globally. There is no reason to explicitly plan/think in terms of individual regions as one would have to traditional cloud offerings (AWS, OCI, Azure). All Cloudflare products integrate seamless as part of a single pipeline that executes from request to response.

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I think it is a complete and very trustful XDR platform, with very few False Positives. It is very well supported by highly skilled professionals on all levels: from pre-sales engineers, Customer Account Managers and support engineers.

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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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In 6+ years of relying on Cloudflare, I think we experienced one or two brief outages that were Cloudflare's fault.

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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

Incentivized

Their Argo for the global network is the core feature we love.

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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)

Incentivized

Excellent product, Cloudflare is a true pioneer of the modern Internet, providing tools, services, and expertise that vastly improve the performance and security of web services. Any issues are resolved quickly with detailed RCA and follow-ups published publicly. I'm thankful to Cloudflare and use their services both at work and at home.

Incentivized

Any time we need to engage the Crowdstrike Falcon Complete Team, their response is switch, thorough, and they are sure to not close out any request until the customer confirms that they have provided an acceptable resolution. If I ever need anything from the account team related to the product, I also get a response from them within minutes typically to address my question. Top notch customer service!

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There is limited amount of learning that can be completed in an in-person training available. In my opinion, the self-paced learning provided by Falcon portal is more useful over in-person training. The support from Falcon is great and useful to overcome difficulties, if any.

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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.

Incentivized

The training provided by Crowdstrike Falcon is complete in terms of the depth of technical knowledge and teaches the users about going through with the platform. There are lots of jargons for different tools that Crowdstrike Falcon has and this training teaches them all which helps in managing the platform better. Plus, the regular knowledge checks are also very helpful for the end user.

Incentivized

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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Very well executed implementation where our team was able to handle the implementation with guidance.

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Read the documentation

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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.

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They have the most generous free offering, and after the free offering limit is reached - you're still getting plenty of value for the buck.

They have very good reputation.

They have an ever expanding list of tools that can support multiple scenarios under one roof.

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It was just a legacy AV program onboarded during initial setup days. As the org. As it expanded, its threat landscape also grew, and we needed a next-gen solution to protect against evolving threat vectors. Falcon EDR was the one that solved all these in a single place.

Incentivized

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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They are built for scale and have the capacity to handle all the traffic we could ever expect to get.

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• Provide an additional layer of DNS security by vetting web traffic
• Help to understand who is consuming bandwidth so we can make adjustments as needed.
• The cost of a single incident from bad web surfing or searches could be enormous. Umbrella helps to avoid these scenarios.

Incentivized

• Immediate ROI on Registrar and DNS hosting while giving a single plane of glass to managing both with domain registrations at cost, and no cost DNS hosting
• WAF helped us move at risk servers/applications into a protected state allowing us to perform remediations at a measured pace and get them done right instead of band aide solutions.
• CDN proxying increase the speed of our website while simultaneously reducing server load.
• DMARC management and report interpretation allow use to identify weak points in our email systems, remediate and move to stricter policies without significantly increasing staff time spent managing it.

Incentivized

• CrowdStrike Falcon's proactive threat mitigation has significantly reduced the risk of successful cyber attacks, resulting in tangible savings related to potential data breaches or system compromises.
• The cloud-native architecture and automated features have improved operational efficiency.
• The platform's real-time visibility and threat hunting capabilities have drastically improved incident response times.

Incentivized