At the time ContentProtect was selected, Forcepoint (Websense at the time) didn't have an inexpensive or cloud type product. The same can be said with Cisco, at that time. Recently, we have reevaluated and are going to be transitioning to Forcepoint's mobile client and …
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
If you are looking for something relatively inexpensive to lock down specific computers, it would be a useful tool. If the computers themselves aren't too locked down, implementation and management shouldn't be too difficult.
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.
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.
Our primary policy is a restricted list, so that does as advertised. We had one location that had blocks based on categories (adult, illegal, etc). We continually had issues with sites getting completely blocked due to unrelated content. For example, Yahoo had a beer ad on the page, alcohol was blocked, so Yahoo became blocked for the period of time that ad was displayed. We had this happen multiple times and eventually switched to a different solution at that location.
I've had issues with their cloud portal not working. I don't have to edit our configuration often, but on numerous occasions, i was unable to get the configuration page to load after login, sometimes for days. The platform just wasn't stable when I needed it to be.
We run many of our remote rooms as frozen (after logoff they reset to the image). This works fine most times, but when content protect needs a configuration change pushed down, someone needs to go 'thaw' the computers, download the updated configuration, and re-'freeze' the computer. It would be nice if that information was just dynamic from the cloud and didn't need to be pulled down.
The categorization used for policies is very limited and not flexible or easily customizable.
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.
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.
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.
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.
At the time ContentProtect was selected, Forcepoint (Websense at the time) didn't have an inexpensive or cloud type product. The same can be said with Cisco, at that time. Recently, we have reevaluated and are going to be transitioning to Forcepoint's mobile client and removing ContentProtect from our environment. The cost is actually now less and we will be able to get both more dynamic control and also give us more detailed reporting on the traffic from clients.
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
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.
It was a relatively inexpensive and simple solution when we needed one relatively quickly, which is a positive. The inexpensive price has kept it in the environment.
The lack of reliable reporting has lead to the need for an alternate monitoring solution in a few cases. Network level reporting was used, which is a separate expense, configuration.
Time has been lost waiting on the portal and then troubleshooting support tickets when sites that shouldn't have been blocked have been blocked. It has resulted in changes for locations that needed dynamic category filtering as opposed to a finite list.
The blocking of sites based on add traffic or sub-sites (rather than just blocking that content like other solutions) has resulted in downtime during classes when those sites were listed in the lesson plan and had previously worked.
