Cisco now offers OpenDNS Umbrella Web Filtering. Cisco acquired OpenDNS in August 2015, and rebranded the product as Cisco Umbrella.
N/A
Oracle Dyn Managed DNS
Score 8.8 out of 10
Mid-Size Companies (51-1,000 employees)
Oracle Dyn DNS (domain name system) is an infrastructure-as-a-service that is touted by Oracle Dyne as one of the highest performance global networks existent. It is available as a managed DNS with secondary DNS available for more reliable business continuity on higher service tiers.
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.
Oracle managed DNS becomes very heavy when there is an ample amount of DNS being managed. However, the DNS creation and updating takes very less time to propagate and is very easy to use. So, for an organization, where there is a modest amount of DNS to manage, it works very well and gives a splendid experience. So, considering the complexity of managing the DNS for an IT company Oracle Dyn managed DNS is the best option to opt.
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.
More responsive sales team to provide relevant QBRs to ensure proper and best practice use of the product/platform
Integration of the Dyn ECT Managed DNS with Dyn Domain Registration would be a nice feature as currently I have to manage two consoles and billing accounts.
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.
This is the only real gripe we have with Dyn; their web-UI can be remarkably painful to use. In the "simple" editor, DNS records are arranged in a kind of "node" view, where each record is a node and any records of the same name or longer (i.e. all records called "record.example.com" or "other.record.example.com") fall under it. This creates an odd sort of hierarchical view that's not really representative of the zone file. The "expert" editor doesn't have an actual delete button, just a checkbox. If you want to update conflicting record types (for example, replacing an A record with a CNAME) you have to check the box for the record being deleted, save changes, create the new record, save changes, and finally publish changes. Dyn uses a publish model for changes, where all changes you make are staged and can be reverted or published all at once. This is fine, except that the publish/revert dialog is in a different page. This is nice when you have many changes, but very annoying when you're changing just one or two records across multiple zones. These are relatively minor issues in an otherwise good platform; annoyances more than deal breakers.
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.
The support team at Dyn has always been very helpful and have tried to answer our questions to the best of their knowledge. We have never had any issues from support tickets and they are often resolved in a few hours
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.
We use both Oracle Dyn Managed DNS and Amazon Route 53. We like having our main DNS provider outside our cloud provider in case there's an issue with Amazon and we need to point things somewhere else temporarily. But for all the smaller stuff and internal stuff, we use Route 53 successfully.
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.
For the law firm its being used for, it keeps their remote users working. For law firms, time is money, usually every 15 minutes lost can be a big deal to them.
Sometimes it has switched when its not supposed to, and causes downtime. No real way to inform users when the switch is happening, it would be great to have an email alert we can not only send to ourselves but a notification to primary and technical partners in the firm so they don't have to yell at us like something is broken, instead they are aware it had to change.
