We compared Cisco Umbrella and Microsoft Defender for Cloud Apps based on our users’ reviews in five categories. After reading the collected data, you can find our conclusion below.
Comparison Results: Microsoft Defender is a better option than Cisco Umbrella according to user reviews. It is highly regarded for its seamless integration with other Microsoft technologies, ease of use, and affordability for smaller businesses. Cisco Umbrella, on the other hand, is praised for its mature solution but is seen as expensive, which creates challenges for smaller corporations. Overall, Microsoft Defender is a better choice for businesses prioritizing integration with Microsoft technologies and cost-effectiveness.
"On the outside, the main differentiation is because Lookout ingest. They have ingested basically all of the apps for the last ten years and all the versions of all the apps, and we have that in a corporate database that allows us to do very large-scale machine learning and analysis on that data set. That's not something that any of the competitors really have the capability to do because they don't have access to the data set. A lot of the apps you can no longer get them because that version of the app is five or six years old, and it just doesn't exist anywhere anymore, except within our infrastructure. So, the ability to have that very rich dataset and learn from that dataset is a real differentiator."
"The solution is stable."
"The most valuable features are the antivirus as a whole, the anti-malware, and all of the protection features that scan our enterprise devices."
"The protection offered by the product is the most valuable feature. It detects vulnerabilities or traps on our users' phones and then prompts them to clean up their devices. Tools we used previously would only discover, which required us to gather information on the backend, so Lookout is a welcome upgrade."
"The Global Block List is one of the most valuable features because it's really easy to block domain names as well as URLs. Sometimes you don't want to block the whole site, you just want to block one URL. The Global Block and Allow Lists are the best features for us."
"When it comes to hybrid work it's pretty effective. We've got the agents. We can protect people inside our building and, when they're using their laptops out in the field, they're still protected. It's working well."
"The most valuable feature for us is the DNS-based protection."
"The core business of Cisco Umbrella is non-malware. That's all it does: block the malware on the gateway."
"It makes it really easy to accomplish content filtering. We don't have to do a lot of customization. You just click the box for the content category and it's up to date."
"It's very stable, reliable and does its job."
"We've found it to be stable and good for our customers."
"The most valuable thing is how easy it is to deploy. We did it with 9,000 users at my last job, and it took a week to get to all the endpoints. Doing that without having to physically touch all those endpoints was very simple."
"The feature that helps us in detecting the sensitive information being shared has been very useful. In addition, the feature that allows MCAS to apply policies with SharePoint, Teams, and OneDrive is being used predominantly."
"It does a great job of monitoring and maintaining a security baseline. For us, that is a key element. The notifications are pretty good."
"I like the web GUI/the management interface. I also like the security of Microsoft. As compared to other manufacturers, it's less complex and easy to understand and work with."
"I like the alert policies because they are quite robust. It has some built-in templates that we can easily pick up. One of them is the alert for mass downloads, when a particular user is running a massive download on your SharePoint site."
"The most valuable feature is its policy implementation."
"The product helps us with privileged identity management to control who has access to what and for how long."
"Everything from Microsoft is integrated. You receive regular reports on them all. You can push your reports, logs, and security alerts, which are all integrated. It is crucial that these solutions work natively together to deliver coordinated detection and response across our environment."
"Threat detection is its key feature, and that's why we use this tool. It gives an alert if a PC is attacked or there is any kind of anomaly, such as there is a spike in sending emails or we see an unauthorized website being accessed. So, it keeps us on our toes. We get to know that there is something wrong, and we can isolate the user and find any issues with it. So, threat detection is very robust in this tool."
"From the analysis that we've done, they do seem to be maybe a step behind in trying to enter the market with a new solution. But when they do pick up, they do come out with some good products."
"Lookout was moving into the SSE space. And so their work on SecureWeb Gateway and SD-WAN is still sort of evolving."
"We just submitted an enhancement request reflecting the main area we want to see improvement in; the APIs. Currently, we're able to build dashboards, but it's somewhat backward because we use our MDM API to create them. Lookout should provide API to customers so we can query our data and use it in our cloud, and this is the only outstanding area for improvement with the product right now."
"The stability depends on the service from where you access it. Because sometimes, the place you are in, you have Gateway. You don't have Gateway. The gateway is overutilized. At the end, you need to go through their gateways. And this is the key point here. You have a tracking point. If it's not well orchestrated, and it scales up as you add more to the existing team, you will suffer"
"They can maybe simplify the configuration. For example, sometimes, the proxy part is quite difficult, and that's why we didn't deploy that."
"The API is very Cisco orientated, which is absolutely fine if you're using Cisco Firepower and SecureX kind of products, but if you want to integrate with third parties, it is a bit tricky. There are some key API connectors for the more prevalent SIEM tools. I would really like to see in Cisco Umbrella the ability to create customized reports and then assign the rights to view these reports to people within a group. I should be able to create a customized report, which is viewable by anybody who has the rights. I should be able to create groups within Cisco Umbrella, and then assign reports to groups and have those reports split out automatically only to those groups. I can kind of do it by restricting my email list, but it is a half-complete way of doing it."
"We faced an issue regarding virtual appliances (VAs) during deployment. They could improve the quality and management of the virtual appliances offered right now. You can't see much because it is a Linux machine, and they have customized it. You don't have any route access to the machine, only seeing limited things in it. When we opened a ticket, they didn't know much about VAs themselves. So, that is where it is lacking right now. I know this will improve in the long run."
"I would like to have more applications being recorded."
"Overall, I'm quite happy with Cisco products, but there could be one place where you can check what's going on. There could be one place where you get all the information about these products so that you don't need to look around. You get the status, information about what lately happened, and if there was anything on the machine in one single place."
"Cisco Umbrella should add some more documentation on proxies."
"User interface could be a little smoother and more intuitive."
"It would be better if there was a little bit of flexibility for organizations that don't have SD One in their environment. Because of the complexity of the environment, it's not easy to actually turn on the feature of the secure internet gateway for our users. We have not been able to explore that option yet."
"Sometimes, we'll get false positive alarms. For example, when a SharePoint path has no file sharing, but there is an external user, it will trigger an alarm that the file has been shared with an external user... the alerting mechanism should be more precise when giving you an alert about what activity has been done with the file..."
"Generally, the pricing can always be improved along with the management system."
"I would like more customization of notifications. Currently, you either get everything or you get limited information. I would like to have something in between where we can customize the data that is included in notifications."
"This service would be better if it had a separate license, only for this service, that could be used to track usage."
"I believe it's only set to be integrated with Microsoft Defender for identity and identity protection. I would like to see it available for use with something like Office 365 Defender. I don't think it's integrated with that yet."
"There could be more granular roles that are out of the box included in the product."
"Microsoft Defender for Cloud Apps' initial setup was quite technical but we were prepared. The time of the implementation depends on the job and how many users are being set up."
"Defender could integrate better with multi-cloud and hybrid environments. It requires some additional configuration to ingest data from non-Azure environments and integrate it with Sentinel."
More Microsoft Defender for Cloud Apps Pricing and Cost Advice →
Cisco Umbrella is ranked 1st in Cloud Access Security Brokers (CASB) with 108 reviews while Microsoft Defender for Cloud Apps is ranked 2nd in Cloud Access Security Brokers (CASB) with 30 reviews. Cisco Umbrella is rated 8.8, while Microsoft Defender for Cloud Apps is rated 8.4. The top reviewer of Cisco Umbrella writes "Protects endpoints wherever they are, always pushing people to the right locations to avoid malicious intent". On the other hand, the top reviewer of Microsoft Defender for Cloud Apps writes "Integrates well and helps us in protecting sensitive information, but takes time to scan and apply the policies and cannot detect everything we need". Cisco Umbrella is most compared with Zscaler Internet Access, Prisma Access by Palo Alto Networks, Palo Alto Networks DNS Security, Fortinet FortiGate SWG and Infoblox Advanced DNS Protection, whereas Microsoft Defender for Cloud Apps is most compared with Zscaler Internet Access, Netskope , Prisma Access by Palo Alto Networks, Qualys VMDR and Microsoft Defender for Identity. See our Cisco Umbrella vs. Microsoft Defender for Cloud Apps report.
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