Cisco Umbrella vs. IBM NS1 Connect

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

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where is well suited - in terms of managing high scale application networks which needs to be present and working in lot of regions - so multi-region failover setup - this is a strength of NS1 connect. Where is it less suited - in term of reporting, like visually ibm team needs to work on their UI UX graphs and all that.

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• 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.

• IBM NS1 Connect provides a comprehensive solution for managing and optimizing traffic steering.
• It provides solutions like Dedicated DNS, which offers a separate resolution network for authoritative DNS, ensuring maximum uptime even in the face of outages.
• It utilizes real-time metrics and automated DNS routing decisions to optimize traffic distribution and ensure resilience.

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• 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.

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• User Experience - Please make it more easy to use for Admins
• Also add some more details in the reference documents
• Try if they can offer a monitoring tool

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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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The product is very easy to use even for a junior admin new to the job. It has an intuitive interface, logical layout and easy to generate reporting. We have been able to catch configuration errors, DDOS attacks and logging of unusual behavior. We also love how it can be used in a redundant fashion to eliminate downtime

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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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The interface can be better. As of now, it is a bit difficult to manage multiple records at the same time or to test the rules effectively. The data reporting is also not as great as we expect with tools of today’s maturity.

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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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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

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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)

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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.

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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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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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Cloudflare offers a very intuitive interface and strong security features, but its DNS traffic management is more opinionated and provides less granular control for complex routing use cases. Akamai is powerful and enterprise‑grade, but it felt heavier and more complex than what we needed for DNS‑focused traffic steering. We ultimately selected IBM NS1 Connect because it struck the right balance between flexibility, intelligence, and control.

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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I gave it an 8 because it handles massive datasets and high user concurrency very reliably without significant performance lag. It’s built for enterprise-level growth, but the infrastructure setup for that maximum scale can get quite complex to manage.

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• 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.

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• Enhanced end-user experience as a result of better performance & uptime
• Easy management - resulting in cutting down in operations cost