We tested multiple products, and what stood out about Umbrella was the following: Multiple domains are protected, and an unlimited number of protected IPs (Public). If you need to protect fewer numbers, other products may suit you, as they're cheaper.
Based on my experience, Splunk is a strong git for some environments and a poor match for others. The distinction is primarily based on infrastructure complexity and budget. It's perfect for large enterprises with a mix of on-prem/cloud infrastructure. It's not a perfect match for small teams with restricted resources.
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.
Writes Powerful Queries: The queries that can be written using the Splunk Query Language are very powerful and highly customizable to meet every need. Ex: Writing queries to search the intersection of two different sources like Network and Endpoint Logs.
Offers Dashboard Abilities: Helps build complex panels for Dashboards in addition to providing several out-of-the-box panels. Ex: creating panels to calculate the performance of analysts in a given timezone.
Helpful Search Aids: It helps to set up complex custom alerts very easily. The interesting fields section is very helpful while threat hunting. Ex: It shows all the users and the frequency of each in a failed login event. The user list on the interesting fields is useful to look for suspicious logins.
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.
Improved User Interface Customization: While the interface is generally intuitive, providing more options for users to customize their dashboards and views would enhance the overall user experience. Tailoring the interface to specific roles or use cases could be a valuable addition.
Simplified Alert Management: Streamlining the process of managing alerts, such as grouping or categorizing them based on severity or type, would make it easier for security teams to prioritize and respond to incidents effectively.
Expanded Threat Intelligence Feeds: Increasing the variety and sources of threat intelligence feeds available within ES would provide a broader context for identifying and mitigating emerging threats, ensuring a more comprehensive defense against evolving attack vectors.
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.
Maintaining hundreds or even 1000+ SOC use cases is really difficult, considering that the Data sources may not always send the data. A module that detects data freshness issues and detect data format changes would be a great help. the main challenge today using Splunk Enterprise Security is making sure that the detection rules are still working properly given all the changes that occur in data source applications. Also, maintaining the data collects on tens of thousands of servers and more than 100k workstations is a real company IT challenge: the splunkbase forwarder may not support old OS anymore, while these are the most important to monitor. Moving to the Open Telemetry collector has become essential so that only 1 agent is required for both SIEM and application observability.
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
It takes a long time for items to load if you are just generally searching through logs. It is best to use the data models which load faster but can be strange in terms of what is coming from which logs where. Yes, you can look it up, but this also requires familiarity with where things are and how to look them up.
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)
It's good when it's responsive, but I've had times where I had to wait quite a while for a response. But these are typically the exceptions rather than the rule. When you do get a response it is always well-informed and appropriate. I would say they've been trending better over time with this.
I experienced only on-line training, but the trainers were very professional and competent. Maybe it could be more useful if they also have an experience in projects because sometimes they didn't have a real project experience to communicate to the students. Anyway, it was very interesting and I learned many thing that's very difficoult (or maybe impossible!) to have by myself, aven if I have more than 10 years of Splunk activity experience.
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.
It was very interesting and I learned many thing that's very difficoult (or maybe impossible!) to have by myself. The only problem was that, when I worked with the Splunk Professional Services, I found some difference between the training contents and the information from PS. In addition is required a long experience on Splunk Enterprise for the data ingestion part, in other words I'm able to work with ES because I'm worling on Splunk since 11 years, otherwise I'd some problem.
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.
Cisco was the right balance of cost and innovation. For us, we had already been users of Umbrella, Cisco Meraki, and DUO. So, it seemed to make sense to invest in the partners we have already entrusted. Since we were a previous Sonicwall customer, we looked closely at them, but they seemed a few steps behind in their feature set. Cato was on the expensive side, and we didn't have a good experience during the ZScaler demonstrations.
Splunk enterprise is the only solution that we’ve been able to identify that provides risk based alerting, which allows our SOC to reduce analyst fatigue which would be a huge problem without it. Before RBA, there were thousands of alerts a day and it was impossible to review all of them
for my exterience, unit pricing and billing frequency are correct. As I already said, I hint to have more discount flexibility, expecially with new customers, because there are competitors less expensive and very aggressive that are dangerous. In addition the possibility to don't pay the license for the development period could be a very interesting feature for the final customers.
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
- 8 out of 10 and took 2 for the data pipeline and administration part. Even if you'd like to improve yourself or your team, you have to pay a lot of money and it could be more than GIAC education + cert. - Normalization for Data models and CPU-based searches can be a problem sometimes.
I had a fantastic experience with Splunk Professional Services: they worked with us in our last SON project (a SOC migration for a very large customer) and helped to build a multi tenent environment even if ES isn't a multi tenant platform. Th Splunk PS was a very professional and competent people, he is italian and was able to speak with our italian customers.
We have a 100% success rate on all our ES implementations due to the amazing documentation and Splunk enablement on the subject.
Our Splunk ES business has grown 100% YoY for the last 3 years.
In terms of long term management and maintenance, ES has been highly stable and predictable, reducing our overhead on costly services team for ad hoc maintenance work.
