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Cisco Umbrella Review
February 20, 2024

Cisco Umbrella Review

Claudio Bolla | TrustRadius Reviewer
Score 9 out of 10
Vetted Review
Verified User

Overall Satisfaction with Cisco Umbrella

So the beauty of the product is that it allows me to have a federal model and that's one of the reasons also why we chose the product. So each business unit is able to configure the product to their needs. And sitting at the group level, I define overall policies of what we want to protect. So blocking all known evil and all known malware or restricting things that could harm the reputation of the company or the personal health and safety of an employee. So I can set those rules at a very high level and then it trickles down to the business unit and the business unit can use those solutions as is or if they want exaggerate and implement more security on top of it. So that's one of the flexibility that we use on a daily basis.
  • I just did, which is the multi-organizational component that allows me to have a federal model where I can dictate very high-level policies. And that is also true in case of an incident or a new malware or a new IP address that is coming out. Or a great example is in 2022 the all-Ukraine deal was growing up in Europe and from a top level we made a decision we were going to block all Russian domains and Ukrainian as well while we were at it and we just pushed it to all the companies in two seconds after then changing control of course. And that was quite valuable. That gives us a lot of freedom and ability. The fact that the product also allows me to have the segmentation permits me to follow the virus regulations in the countries. So for example, in Germany, there are a lot of stricter rules on what you can and not do in monitoring an employee from a work council and union perspective, and therefore we have a special setup for them specifically and also where the logs are stored in the region. My American team has the same thing, but in that case, the storage of those logs is stored in the US and that gives us great flexibility for sure. Then okay, there is some businesses that are also using it to police employees, meaning I don't want 'em see 'em job search websites or I don't want them to be looking at travel planning their vacation during business hours or I don't want my blue-collar workers to do anything other those 10 applications on the internet, on the web. So we are able to do that. It's not the part that is more fun because of a lot of HR involvement, but we use it also that way.
  • There's always room for improvement in all products for sure. On the umbrella part, I would say that the room for improvement is on the data loss prevention part. So it sits on the PCs, it sees a lot of the traffic that goes on, it knows what files are on the PCs, but it's actually not stopping some of the intellectual property or personal identifiable information from going out. So we are able to block users from accessing applications and websites or even IP addresses, but we're not able to go a bit more granular, more on the data loss side. So that's a gap that I have in the product.
  • So it's always very hard to calculate return on investment, especially on security and especially in a physical product. So it's not like I'm going to be selling a lot more plastic or a lot more aviation fuel because I implemented Cisco Umbrella. What I know is that definitely, the return on investment is on the ability of the business to continue to run and give the assurance that our users are safe.
We evaluated a lot of products. The good part is that we didn't go outside. So Ineos grew by acquisition and therefore we inherited a lot of products there. So we looked at the Netskope and Fortinet because they were within our sphere of product portfolios that we had in the company and those were the primary two that we looked at.

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

Yes

Are you happy with Cisco Umbrella's feature set?

Yes

Did Cisco Umbrella live up to sales and marketing promises?

Yes

Did implementation of Cisco Umbrella go as expected?

No

Would you buy Cisco Umbrella again?

Yes

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.