Cisco Umbrella Reviews & Insights

Score8.7 out of 10

267 Reviews and Ratings

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Cisco Umbrella Reviews

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Cisco Umbrella is a must go DNS protections

Rating: 9 out of 10

Incentivized

June 16, 2025

Use Cases and Deployment Scope

Cisco Umbrella provides us with DNS protection as part of our security suite. We use it in addition to other products to provide an overall security umbrella.

Pros

DNS restrictions
Malware protection
DNS insights

Cons

Better workflow
Automation for users policies
Ability to use AD security groups to define user policies

Likelihood to Recommend

We occasionally run into sites being blocked by Cisco Umbrella but they do not show in the dashboard as blocked or receive the blocked page. It would be nice to have that information on the block page or the logs to better troubleshoot.

Verified User

Engineer in Information Technology (501-1000 employees)

Vetted Review

20 years of experience

Cisco Umbrella

Rating: 7 out of 10

Incentivized

June 12, 2025

Use Cases and Deployment Scope

Protect internet traffic for the org

Pros

DNS forwarding
Block list rules
Network profiles

Cons

Blocklist UI
Network profiles definition

Likelihood to Recommend

Block traffic for computers

Verified User

Engineer in Information Technology (1-10 employees)

Vetted Review

6 years of experience

Cisco Umbrella AD DDI

Rating: 10 out of 10

Incentivized

March 26, 2025

Use Cases and Deployment Scope

My organization uses Cisco Umbrella as a layer of protection for users accessing Internet. We used the native embedded classification of malicious URLs but also to monitor who is attempting to connect to theses URLs. In addition, we use our internal threat Intel feeds to enrich the umbrella URL classification. To identify affected endpoints and users. The solution is integrated with our AD solution and our DDI platform

Pros

URL classification
Integration with DDI and AD
blacklisting/whitelisting

Cons

Better integration with non Cisco Products

Likelihood to Recommend

Positive: The business case is clear, and it fits perfectly. Avoid users connecting to malicious URLs and if so early detect and stop. Integration with Cisco Secure Endpoint and Cisco XDR works smoothly Positive: It feeds from intelligence sources all over the Internet Positive: Performance is amazing as it cops with huge amount of Data You do not have to worry to patch a platform as it is a SaaS Neutral: Integration with third party solutions is feasible but not so straight forward

Verified User

Analyst in Information Technology (1001-5000 employees)

Vetted Review

3 years of experience

An important product for securing information

Rating: 9 out of 10

Incentivized

March 18, 2025

Use Cases and Deployment Scope

Our business needs a reliable security solution to ensure business continuity. We use Cisco Umbrella primarily to secure our staff's web browsing and prevent them from going to malicious sites. We need to be able to protect company workstations against malware. We also use other tools to maintain a high level of security by creating a multi-layered firewall.

Pros

Protect web surfing
User behavior
Easy to use
Modern layout

Cons

Giving trough email more information
Get more information blocked sites

Likelihood to Recommend

Cisco Umbrella is a cloud-based service, so there is no need to invest in maintaining it, everything is done automatically. This allows us to focus primarily on monitoring malicious sites, leaving us more time for security and other IT tasks. To date, we have not identified anything that could affect our continued use of the service.

Vesa Jordan

CTO at Finnfund in Information Technology at Finnfund (51-200 employees)

Vetted Review

5 years of experience

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Cisco Umbrella

Rating: 10 out of 10

Incentivized

March 15, 2025

Use Cases and Deployment Scope

We are using it to protect our entire organization. We use it to deny access to mal-domains CNC fishing, etc. Filter non business related sites, I especially like that fact we can block newly registered domains that although it might catch a legit site, most new domains are high risk for malware, or CNC. I have used this in its free form at home as OpenDNS. With proper MS Active directory you can track requests by user. We have the option to integrate into our AnyConnect VPN client as well still working on that.

Pros

It is easy to setup and they have very helpful onboarding staff.
It took only a few hours to get it up and running.
It is updated in Realtime by Cisco Talos Intelligence who are awesome.

Cons

It takes a while to get the order of policies figured out.
There is a slight delay in changes as it filters down to your client.

Likelihood to Recommend

It is good for whole network protection, and individual PCs with the client. Provide good reporting on where your network is going on the net. One thing I would like is a longer history with the logs 14 and 30 days are too short some times.

Robert Rogers

Senior IT Systems Analyst in Information Technology at Kalamazoo County Government (501-1000 employees)

Vetted Review

3 years of experience

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Cisco Umbrella - An excellent DNS control security solution

Rating: 10 out of 10

Incentivized

March 14, 2025

Use Cases and Deployment Scope

The business problem and scope was how my company protect the organization from DNS related malware. We were looking for a proven and trusted product by a company that had years of experience in the field. We use Cisco in many areas and decided that this product was best for us.

Pros

DNS related malware protection
Cloud deployment
Excellent and deep controls

Cons

Make advance configurations easier to understand and deploy
Content filtering needs to be expanded
Expensive

Likelihood to Recommend

In my opinion Cisco Umbrella is excellent for medium to large scale deployments. The Cisco Umbrella solution does a great job in DNS related malware control, URL filtering (even though a bit limited) and reporting to just name a few. If you are a smaller company with limited budget, this is probably not the solution for you due to cost.

Verified User

Vice-President in Information Technology (501-1000 employees)

Vetted Review

7 years of experience

Cisco Umbrella

Rating: 8 out of 10

Incentivized

March 4, 2025

Use Cases and Deployment Scope

We use Cisco Umbrella SIG to secure our Mobile Workers.
Because of Covid we had an huge increase in mobile workers and had to allow split tunneling because our infrastructure could not handle the load.
The "always on" Web Filter gives us an extra level of security even when the traffic is not routed through our central firewall.

Pros

DNS Security: Analyse DNS request and blocks if necessary.
Web Filter: This is our content filter for mobile workers.
SSL inspection: We could outsource the sandboxing of files and the ssl inspection to the cloud. There is no load on our infrastructure.

Cons

The many different policy rules are already addressed with Secure Access.
The features for Roaming Client management are very less.
Cisco Products are still not harmonized. there is a difference in a central Firepower web filter category and the umbrella web filter category.

Likelihood to Recommend

It is a good and stable Secure Internet Gateway.
But it does not work in China and needs more local breakouts.
Our web traffic is not terminating in neighbor country.

Verified User

Manager in Information Technology (5001-10,000 employees)

Vetted Review

4 years of experience

Cisco Umbrella Review

Rating: 10 out of 10

Incentivized

February 25, 2025

Use Cases and Deployment Scope

We use it to get all the users, so we can block sites they don't need to access, so I don't know if we have different kind of websites we don't want them to access, we can block the access through there.

Pros

It's good at blocking things and also if we have to unplug any sites, I'll use system to access. It's easy to put in them URL and we have it allowed, so that's good.

Cons

I'm not sure that this moment.

Likelihood to Recommend

Well, on a daily basis for all our users, we have a lot of people just go into different websites and stuff and it's good to block all of these websites. We don't want our users to access, so we don't get any malicious things from those websites.

Julie Munkholm

Junio Network Engineer in Information Technology at Centrica Energy Trading (10,001+ employees)

Vetted Review

3 years of experience

Cisco Umbrella Review

Rating: 8 out of 10

Incentivized

February 25, 2025

Use Cases and Deployment Scope

So all our users were in the past on safe managed perimeter firewalls around over the world. So we used own managed data centers with firewalls in IT to direct the users to our on-premise firewalls and let them out to the internet. And now we are migrating all the users to Umbrella or Cisco CQ access to get rid of the self-managed parameter firewalls and only using the umbrella security features for our users. Doesn't matter if they are in the office or in the home office, doesn't matter. We always connecting them to the security product of Cisco and let them out to the internet.

Pros

So for example, we had the problem in the past. We are connecting users to our own managed data centers. We had seven locations around the world, put them with Cisco, any connect to our on-prem data center and let them out to the internet. So that's causing some high latency bad experiences with teams and so on. And with Umbrella we can directly connect the user to the cloud and to the internet so the users have a good experience with speed with latency and it's much better than back hauling the traffic to their own company and then processing them there.

Cons

So we had in the past very general rule sets, very detailed rule sets for security rules. Like you can access this page but not this IP range and so on. So hundreds of specific rules for specific machines and the rule management in Cisco Umbrella is not that granular. So it was not possible to build up these rule sets in Cisco Umbrella, but now we see to access it's much better already. So that's why one reason why we are migrating to CQ access to have better API based possibility to manage these rule sets and synchronize them between different products that we are using and in the cloud. So yeah, we hope that with secure access it's a little bit more granular like with Cisco Umbrella currently.

Likelihood to Recommend

If you have small offices around the world and you need to secure them for the internet and if you do not like to place on-premise hardware there, put firewalls there and so on. Just use Cisco Umbrella, connect the offices with a VPN handler or with SD one directly to Cisco Umbrella and let them out securely to the internet. It's the easiest and cheapest way I guess if you have small branch offices, it's the only option that you have currently.

Verified User

Engineer in Information Technology (10,001+ employees)

Vetted Review

1 year of experience

Safer internet with Cisco Umbrella.

Rating: 8 out of 10

Incentivized

February 13, 2025

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

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.

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.

Osman Gani

Project Coordinator in Information Technology at Hamida Traders Ltd (htl-bd.com) (1001-5000 employees)

Vetted Review

1 year of experience

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Safer internet with Cisco Umbrella.

Rating: 8 out of 10

Incentivized

February 13, 2025

Use Cases and Deployment Scope

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.

Likelihood to Recommend

Osman Gani

Project Coordinator in Information Technology at Hamida Traders Ltd (htl-bd.com) (1001-5000 employees)

Vetted Review

1 year of experience