Cisco Umbrella vs Symantec WebFilter / Intelligence Services

Cisco Umbrella is perfect in an environment where you allow internet browsing without any restrictions on the types of websites. It allows you to categorize certain websites and block them at the DNS level. If you already have a web proxy installed and are blocking certain categories of websites on that proxy, then Cisco Umbrella is probably not the right tool for you.

In a large environment, this is the perfect system. If you do not have constant changes, it easily becomes a system you drop in place and rarely have to think about. Our units have been rock solid and have never experienced any unexpected downtime, and upgrades are just a couple button clicks to deploy, or roll back. For small offices, with minimal traffic this may be using a sledgehammer to put in a push pin. It will work great, but the devices is likely over engineered for small offices (<50 people). That being said, price-wise it's still a great solution when compared to competing products and being from Symantec, you know it's going to be around and support for the long term.

• Cisco Umbrella protects our devices and users from malicious sites of all kinds.
• Cisco Umbrella allows us to add additional web site types we may want to block for specific users.
• Cisco Umbrella keeps the list of sites blocked current by utilizing data from their entire security platform.

• Excellent at preventing unwanted browsing and malicious sites
• Great reporting, useful to see potential issues and/or sites that may need to be reviewed for potential whitelisting.
• Perfect system for kiosk environments, limiting browsing to local on-network sites until the user authenticates

• 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.

• The admin interface would be better off not using Java
• Setting up SSL properly can be a bit challenging
• Could really use a better source for training, like a library of how-to videos

We have had an excellent experience with Cisco products generally and Umbrella specifically. From implementation to continuity we have nothing to take issue or complain about with this product. Would highly recommend this product as we 100% intend to renew from our end.

The product was easy to install and get running. To maintain the product is also a simple matter of maintaining lists of wanted and unwanted domains or URLs. The basic and advanced security features all do what they are intended to do with no known erroneous outcomes

I really like the system, it's easy to use and mostly intuitive. I would have gone 10/10, but the management interface uses Java, and that seems to always make things a bit harder to start. Once everything is loaded and running, it's great - but it does require me to maintain a compatible version of Java on the machine I use to access the system, I'd be much happier with some kind of HTML5 interface. I also deducted 1 point for the functionality of the refer filter - it works as expected, but if the site isn't coded with the correct refer header, like Microsoft's site - then some page elements get stripped and pages only render about 98% correctly. I know that's not in Symantec's list of responsibilities, but having a filter that doesn't fully understand CDNs is worth the 1 point ding.

I have to give a 10 here. I think I've had maybe one or two times in 13 years I had issues. Only one time it was an issue inside OpenDNS/Umbrella. Sometimes you have to tune a content category or add an exception but I would ALWAYS rather have to do that then mop up a mess

Our network team mostly works with Cisco support but from what I understand, they were pretty helpful because we're an enterprise company. We use a few other Cisco products, so we do get a pretty good response from Cisco customer support. I'm not a fan of Cisco's SSO because we can't put it behind Okta but that's beyond the scope of this.

I've had exactly 1 problem in 8 years, I contacted support via the customer portal, less than an hour later I found myself in a screen share with a support tech who not only fixed my configuration error, but also took the time to ask about my usage and offered some great tips on changes. It was just one support incident, but I was impressed by the speed of response to a non-critical issue as well as the depth of product knowledge the support engineer had.

The implementation of the Cisco Umbrella client on organizational units was pretty straight forward. The implementation behind the scenes was a bit more trickier but manageable. This was due to needing open the correct channels to allow for the correct communication to the Cisco Umbrella servers. Once everything was up and running, setting up the policies and requiring them was simple.

We used a product before this called iPrism by EdgeWave and also briefly tried Barracuda Web Security in the cloud. We were having such a large influx of service desk calls about proxy-based layer 7 web filters that we wanted to step back and pick something more at the DNS level, to protect our employees but not hover over their social media use, etc. Cisco will also employ a layer 7 proxy if a site is suspicious, which does require us to push a certificate out should we want that feature. For most policies we have it enabled.

Symantec WebFilter / Intelligence Services solution was a simple 1U appliance that does everything we need, compared to the Forcepoint solution which required a virtual appliance, a database server, a log server, and a management server - the licensing costs alone make the Symantec WebFilter / Intelligence Services solution a clear winner. The Forcepoint solution is really good, it just requires such a big footprint without delivering much beyond what the Symantec WebFilter / Intelligence Services solution does with a single unit.

• On the positive side, the product does help block known bad sites, resulting in less time that technicians spend cleaning infections.
• On the negative side, the problem that causes Windows to incorrectly report no Internet access has taken a lot of time for many technicians.
• Reporting features for individual clients help us more efficiently provide browsing reports when needed.

• Helps maintain network security and prevents malicious browsing
• Helps to prevent dangerous internet usage from network servers
• Relatively low cost means fast ROI with drastically reduced security response costs