Umbrella DNS Security Essentials

The main use case for Cisco Umbrella in my work is to protect the DNS queries going outside to the internet.

One of the best things I appreciate about Cisco Umbrella is that it provides protection for endpoints even while you are off the network and not behind the firewall. If you are working from home, your DNS queries are protected effectively, though there is one caveat: it only protects DNS queries. If you are accessing something via IP address, it does not work as well. IP protection is not blocked by Cisco Umbrella, but DNS queries are, and it works well for endpoints protected even from a public network.

Cisco Umbrella has definitely improved the security posture and the overall organization security posture management.

The only frustration I have with Cisco Umbrella is that people can exit the Umbrella roaming client to bypass the security. Some people who are technical can bypass it by putting the IP address into the host file. These are a few things which sometimes become frustrating when people try to bypass the Umbrella protection.

If I could change one thing about Cisco Umbrella to improve that situation, I would include traffic for DNS resolution even on IP addresses to give extra protection on that layer and conduct deeper analysis. Considering AI, which is evolving rapidly, I would suggest including AI as an integration into Cisco Umbrella.

I have been familiar with Cisco Umbrella for almost one year.

Before we adopted Cisco Umbrella, we did not have any tool. We only used the firewall as a prevention tool and mostly relied on next-generation antivirus which looks at behavioral analytics.

When I first implemented Cisco Umbrella, it took a simple and quick configuration in the SaaS tool on the cloud. To protect the endpoints, we need to deploy the clients on the endpoints, which is time-consuming. Configuring policies and downloading the client is easy, perhaps a one or two-day task, but deploying the clients to all the endpoints definitely takes time.

I was not involved in the POC of Cisco Umbrella, but I was part of the engineering team who deployed it.

My advice for someone considering Cisco Umbrella, based on my experience over the past year, is to understand your clear business requirements. Definitely check for all the required features. Cisco Umbrella is good for DNS security, but there are many other competitive tools in the market such as Zscaler that overcome the challenges I saw in Cisco Umbrella. Based on your requirements, cost, and budget, analyze the tool during the POC and finalize it.

The first thing that we do when we open Cisco Umbrella is watch the dashboard, which shows the traffic analysis, what traffic looked like in the last 24 hours, how many malicious queries have been blocked, what the valid usages are, how many blacklisted items there are, and how many URLs that we have blocked have hits. That is how we conduct day-to-day analysis of it.

The scope of monitoring Cisco Umbrella involves two or three people or some people in the SOC team who do the monitoring.

My team needed a small interaction just to explain how the use cases that we implemented in Cisco Umbrella work, which was something important. The knowledge base article available on the Cisco website was good enough and useful to have on hand.

Cisco Umbrella was used company-wide.

The only feature I think about is SSL inspection, which we never enabled because it requires lots of approval and legality.

I have seen improvement in that Cisco Umbrella has cut down on malicious traffic. If there is any new domain registered by a malicious actor or hacker, it was quickly detected by Cisco Umbrella. There was some phishing link that we got to know about and blocked in Cisco Umbrella, so anyone getting that phishing link and trying to reach that domain would be blocked. This feature is especially effective even when you are off the network. I would rate this review seven out of ten.

My main use case for Cisco Umbrella is to protect DNS queries that are going outside to the internet. When I open Cisco Umbrella, the first thing I do is watch the dashboard to analyze what the traffic looks like in the last 24 hours, how many malicious queries have been blocked, what the valid usages are, and how many blacklisted URLs have hits.

The scope of monitoring Cisco Umbrella involves two or three people or some people in the SOC team doing the monitoring. Cisco Umbrella is used company-wide.

From my experience using Cisco Umbrella, one of the best features is that it provides protection for the endpoints even while off the network, which means that if you are working from home, your DNS queries are protected well enough, with the caveat that it only protects DNS queries but does not work well when accessing something via IP address.

Cisco Umbrella has definitely helped improve some aspects of our security posture, contributing to overall organizational security posture management. I have seen improvements in that it cut down on malicious traffic; if there is a new domain registered by a malicious actor or hacker, it is quickly detected by Cisco Umbrella. For instance, there was a phishing link we discovered, and we blocked it in Cisco Umbrella, ensuring anyone trying to access that domain would be blocked, which is a critical feature even when off the network.

The biggest frustration I have encountered with Cisco Umbrella is that people can exit the Cisco Umbrella roaming client to bypass security, and some technically savvy individuals might know how to bypass it by modifying the hosts file to exclude Cisco Umbrella.

If I could change one thing about Cisco Umbrella, it would be to include traffic for DNS resolution even on IP addresses for extra protection and to enhance the analysis capabilities, considering the advancements in AI.

During implementation, there were not really any features that we are not using today, but SSL inspection was something we never enabled due to requiring extensive approval and legality considerations.

I have been familiar with Cisco Umbrella for almost one year.

Before adopting Cisco Umbrella, we did not have any tool and only used the firewall as a prevention tool, mostly relying on next-generation antivirus focused on behavioral analytics.

In terms of implementation, Cisco Umbrella is more of a SaaS tool, and configuring in the SaaS tool on the cloud is simple and quick; however, to protect the endpoints, deploying the clients on the endpoints is time-consuming. Configuring policies and downloading the client is easy, perhaps a one or two day task, but deploying the clients to all the endpoints definitely takes more time.

When evaluating options, I was not involved in the POC of Cisco Umbrella; I was a part of the engineering team that deployed it.

My team did need a small interaction with team members to explain the use cases implemented in Cisco Umbrella, which was important, and the knowledge base articles available on the Cisco website were good and useful to have handy.

My advice for someone considering Cisco Umbrella, based on my experience over the past year, is to understand your clear business requirements, check all the required features, and note that Cisco Umbrella provides good DNS security, though there are other competitive tools, such as Zscaler, which address the challenges I noticed in Cisco Umbrella. Based on your requirements and budget, analyze the tool during the POC and finalize your choice. I would rate my overall experience with Cisco Umbrella as a seven out of ten.

In a previous organization at HBL, we were using Cisco Umbrella as well, so it has been a quite long time.

Cisco Umbrella is specifically designed for DNS protection, with features including a user-friendly console and the easiest installation. It offers very prominent threat feeding from different Talos sources, securing multiple platforms. Cisco Umbrella helps protect from malware and unsafe sites. It is especially useful in mitigating DNS attacks and ensuring secure browsing for end users.

The major issue is that sometimes when you install the client, it shows you protected and displays that it is live with the backend servers and everything. However, in reality, it was not getting any feed from the main client and is just sending your traffic to open DNS, which sometimes causes an issue because the protection you have implemented can be breached by users.

The primary thing that Cisco Umbrella lacked most of the time is their client. Previously, they had a separate Cisco client. Now they have merged everything into the Cisco Secure Endpoint client—one client for everything, for Cisco Endpoint, for Cisco AnyConnect, and for Cisco Umbrella, which they did probably in 2025.

I have been using this solution for almost two years.

As a customer, I have never been satisfied with any product for a longer period of time, so that is a tricky question to answer.

If you require 10 clients or however many you need or whatever expansion you require, they are just a click away.

Cisco is always known for their best technical support, so there is no doubt about it.

At that time I was working in HBL on the Symantec DLP product.

Cisco Umbrella is specifically designed for DNS protection, and the features they have include a user-friendly console and probably the easiest installation.

If you go with the main competitor product, there is no doubt that Infoblox is the best product.

There are a couple of products we are working on. We use Cisco EDR and XDR, for DLP we have Forcepoint, and for cyber threat intelligence, we have EPP.

We focus on DLP and the classification tool, which is for data visibility and DLP. It is kind of data protection that is used for classification.

For Cisco, we use FTDs. It is the Cisco Secure Endpoint, which is known as Cisco EDR, Endpoint Detection and Response.

We use Cisco Umbrella for DNS protection. In the current environment, cyber security resolves your addresses securely and protects from threats from outside. Most attacks happen over DNS, so those DNS queries can be mitigated if you have a secure way for browsing for your end users.

We are not using Cisco Umbrella for the proxy. We are using it from our DNS perspective. As a strategy, we are using it for outside communication through the DNS resolver. However, Cisco Umbrella has now combined with Secure Access, which comes with different features. Previously, Cisco had WSA for the proxy. Now they have come up with a proxy solution that gives Cisco Umbrella protection with remote proxy and cloud proxy solution, which is known as Secure Access.

As I mentioned earlier, they have very prominent threat feeding from different Talos sources, securing us on multiple platforms where, as an enterprise, you might not have those features and the feed to protect yourself. Cisco Umbrella is definitely a good product from that perspective and is going to help you protect from malware and from sites which are reputedly not marked as safe for the user. I would rate this review an eight out of ten.