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Cisco Umbrella is worth considering, but lacks refinement and does not integrate seamlessly with other Cisco and Meraki products.
March 10, 2022

Cisco Umbrella is worth considering, but lacks refinement and does not integrate seamlessly with other Cisco and Meraki products.

Nicolas Tenthorey | TrustRadius Reviewer
Score 5 out of 10
Vetted Review
Verified User

Overall Satisfaction with Cisco Umbrella

We use Cisco Umbrella on all systems, including servers, firewalls, laptops, cellular devices. Cisco Umbrella offers a unified management portal that allows administrators to scope policies and audit web traffic. By implementing Cisco Umbrella, we increased our visibility and simplified our URL management policies that were independently managed by our firewalls in the past.
  • Unified Management Interface is easy to use
  • Site based IP address configuration for catch all DNS traffic
  • Whitelist and blacklist easy
  • 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.

Do you think Cisco Umbrella delivers good value for the price?

Not sure

Are you happy with Cisco Umbrella's feature set?

Yes

Did Cisco Umbrella live up to sales and marketing promises?

I wasn't involved with the selection/purchase process

Did implementation of Cisco Umbrella go as expected?

Yes

Would you buy Cisco Umbrella again?

No

  • Cisco Umbrella helps secure our network
  • Cisco Umbrella looks good
  • Cisco Umbrella is redundant in some cases
Remote users are forced to use the Cisco Umbrella roaming client. All web traffic off our network is routed through Cisco Umbrella's DNS, thus giving us full visibility and control over the endpoint URL filtering. By keeping our endpoints safe off-site, we can help mitigate risks that commonly occur on public wifi or unsecured networks.
My biggest complaint about Cisco and Meraki products is their promise to integrate. The integration is supposed to be easy, but it's not. API keys are needed to be generated even though these companies are supposedly related. Cisco and Meraki could do a much better job at providing a single portal, with ALL products, Meraki, Cisco Umbrella, AMP.
I feel getting support for Cisco Umbrella is just as difficult as it is for other Cisco products. In my experience, it's very clunky and cumbersome for the customer to get actual help. Jumping through hoops and logins to identify a product contract and customer agreement number is commonplace when trying to open a case with TAC. Cisco should take notes from Meraki, where it's a lot easier to get help.
I have never used alternative DNS filtering solutions. Meraki DNS and content category filtering is the only other product I have used to block URLs as such.
Cisco Umbrella provides another layer of protection on top of firewalls and antivirus. Cisco Umbrella makes whitelisting, blacklisting, and categorical web filtering easier through the use of a single admin portal. Updates to these lists are populated almost instantly to all of your local and remote devices. Cisco Umbrella may be overkill for smaller businesses that do not have a distributed workforce.