Cisco now offers OpenDNS Umbrella Web Filtering. Cisco acquired OpenDNS in August 2015, and rebranded the product as Cisco Umbrella.
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Next-Generation Firewalls - PA Series
Score 9.3 out of 10
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Palo Alto next-generation firewalls classify all traffic, including encrypted and internal traffic, based on application, application function, user and content. Users can create security policies to enable only authorized users to run sanctioned applications.
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Pricing
Cisco Umbrella
Palo Alto Networks Next-Generation Firewalls - PA Series
Palo Alto Networks Next-Generation Firewalls - PA Series
Considered Both Products
Cisco Umbrella
Verified User
Technician
Chose Cisco Umbrella
Barracuda has some additional feature sets in its physical Web Security Gateway hardware, however Umbrella has been more reliable for what we are doing in our environment.
Palo Alto Networks Next-Generation Firewalls - PA Series
Likelihood to Recommend
Cisco
So the well-suited product, it's actually in two areas. One I already touched base on earlier which is the ability to have a federal model where we have the flexibility to set high-level policies from a group perspective while giving the independence of the business unit to operate and model the system to meet their needs. The second one, which is very powerful, especially in the last few years, is the remote workers. I'm able to protect and extend that edge of my security to their endpoint regardless if they are a Cisco Live or if they are at a bar or on a train basically anywhere. So as a chemical company, we have a lot of OT or ICS industrial control systems, which are highly regulated and highly scrutinized and usually require a physical presence while Cisco umbrella is mostly a cloud native type of product. So it doesn't fit well in that environment, which is detached from the internet doing well.
Palo Alto firewall only affords by Large level infrastructure having a budget for Security Prospect. I will recommend it for the Card information industry & Confidential data solutions. Because it provides a bucket of security features that are not easily vulnerable.
The PA handles VPN connectivity without missing a beat. We have multiple VPN tunnels in use for redundancy to cloud-based services.
The PA has great functionality in supporting failover internet connections, again with the ability to have multiple paths out to our cloud-based services.
The PA is updated on the regular with various security updates, we are not concerned with the firewall's ability to see what packets are really flowing across the network. Being able to see beyond just IP and port requests lets you know things are locked down better than traditional firewalls.
It is a great overall kit, with URL filtering and other services that fill in the gaps between other solutions without breaking the bank.
Umbrella Virtual Appliances have been buggy in resolving local domain hosts.
Integration between other Cisco and Meraki products is complicated.
Reporting is not always accurate; for example, if you configure a Meraki access point to use an Umbrella Virtual Appliance, you lose device reporting. All reporting shows up under the AP's IP.
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.
The PA5220s have far exceeded what we have expected out of them. It was a bit of a learning curve coming from another vendor, but everything falls into place now with ease. The capabilities of the solution still surprise us, allowing us to remove other costly hardware and providing a single point of management needed
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.
In my opinion, the Palo Alto Firewall is the simplest firewall in terms of management interfaces; though it has more advanced options that apply to more advanced use cases. Configuring basic features on the firewall is nearly self-explanatory; configuring more advanced features can be met with very thorough vendor documentation.
Cisco Umbrella's availability was great, they got back to me in less than an hour to get my problem solved.
We needed to get our Meraki AP's hooked up to Cisco Umbrella to monitor that specific traffic and they got back to me promptly, they guided me and explained every question I had.
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
We have not had a chance to use Cisco support frequently, but when we needed to troubleshoot some issues that we were having with the agent installation, the support was very responsive and the solution that they offered worked. The only reason I give it one less point is that the turnaround time for non-critical issues is very long.
We've run into a couple undocumented bugs, but that seems to happen with every brand and technology. Any time we've had to engage Palo Alto support they've always been professional, knowledgeable and prompt. In almost all cases we've been able to resolve our issues without having to escalate our tickets.
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.
Auto SIG Tunnels is a feature that helps in provisioning tunnels automatically using Cisco Umbrella APIs and so this is one win for choosing Cisco Umbrella over others. With Cisco SD-WAN viptela, the Cisco Umbrella stacks up well because its the same vendor so less complexities and interoperability issues.
No one can say any other companies in this time is better than Palo Alto Networks Next-Generatoin Firewalls. Palo Alto offers very advanced features which protect you[r] organization. Advanced malware protection, anti spam, lots of other threats.
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
Cisco Umbrella has been an excellent investment for us. The extra protection it provides in a very simple way has been well worth the costs.
Cisco Umbrella is very easy to setup and manage and can do most of the things we need with little daily interaction so we are free to work on other systems that need more attention.
Utilizing the Cisco Umbrella reporting features, we can determine what systems might need additional attention. If we see systems attempting certain types of access, we quickly know there is likely something on the device that probably needs removed.
Specific Cisco Umbrella reports can help us determine if we need to do user education and develop cyber habits.
Overall, even though the device is very expensive (both hardware and licensing), the product does produce a decent ROI, given that one (or HA pair) of devices can do so many things, such as anti-virus, anti-malware, URL filtering, SSL decryption, SSL VPN, routing, etc.
There will definitely be sticker shock when you're renewal comes up annually (or after 3 years), so be sure to look very carefully at the recurring costs of this product, with respect to licensing and hardware/software maintenance.
