Item: Cisco Umbrella
Rating: 8
Author: Osman Gani

Overall Satisfaction with Cisco Umbrella

Use Cases and Deployment Scope

We use Cisco Umbrella for several purposes, one of them is to secure our internet users within our office network. Cisco Umbrella works as a shield for us against cyber threats by blocking access to malicious websites, preventing phishing attacks, and implementing security policies for all the users within our office. It also saves time for us by automatically blocking known cyber threats which help us to focus more on other critical incidents.

Pros and Cons

Pros

Managing the overall security policies is quite seamless in Cisco Umbrella. it is quite easy to set up and implement web filtering rules and other necessary configurations without any hassle.
The reporting features like 'activity search' provides greater visibility of our user's internet activity within our organization. We can identify security related risks quickly and take decisions to mitigate them.
The deployment and integration of Cisco Umbrella with other vendors product is quite appreciable. We other non cisco security devices which Cisco Umbrella was integrated with without any major issues.
We can easily track down any user that goes to the internet through the activity search feature.

Cons

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.

Return on Investment

It's a costly product and we have to admit that, but security breaches are costlier, and they can take more than we can afford so we always had positive mindset over our security purchase and Cisco Umbrella had overall positive impact.

Cisco Products Used for Hybrid Work

Cisco Secure Access by Duo

Organizational Challenges Faced

Employees were using different other software from other vendors so when i decided to go full on cisco it too a bit time for everyone to adapt but it was worth it.

Alternatives Considered

Cisco AnyConnect

Key Insights

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?

Yes

Would you buy Cisco Umbrella again?

Yes

Other Software Used

Cisco Catalyst Switches, Cisco AnyConnect

Likelihood to Recommend

Cisco Umbrella most of the time actively blocks high malicious domain by itself which we found very effective to save our employees from phishing campaigns. Another great use of Cisco Umbrella is the web content filtering feature helps by setting up custom rules and block access to non-work-related or potentially harmful sites/URL/domains. So, I think Cisco Umbrella suits pretty well if anyone is trying to protect their organizations from one of the biggest cyber threat these days which is phishing.

Comments

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