We compared Cisco Umbrella and Versa Unified Secure Access Service Edge (SASE) Platform across several parameters based on our user's reviews. After reading the collected data, you can find our conclusion below:
The Versa Unified Secure Access Service Edge (SASE) Platform is preferred over Cisco Umbrella due to its comprehensive feature set, including firewall, VPN, and secure web gateway. Users highlight its ability to seamlessly integrate with existing networking infrastructures, as well as its superior performance and scalability. Versa SASE Platform offers advanced security analytics and AI-driven automation, ensuring better threat detection and mitigation capabilities compared to Cisco Umbrella.
"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 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 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."
"There is much differentiation within the licensing so if anyone wants DNS security from the DNS security log, we are there already, and if anyone wants to go to a secure internet gateway, that is also available. We can get the integrated cloud DLP license keys. That is a good benefit with Cisco Umbrella. You can get a complete solution in a single licensing."
"If it didn't have a single pane of glass, we would not be using it. The single pane of glass gives you a one-stop shop. It's like going to Home Depot. You find all your stuff there. You can see all your threats and your endpoints. It's a very important feature and makes things very simple."
"Using this solution has meant that we've needed to make fewer firewall changes."
"It offers good visibility for the Administrator. The administrator has full visibility of what is blocked or has the knowledge of where users go when they are surfing the internet."
"The reports and notifications are the most useful part of the platform. As soon as you deploy the security layers, the reporting is very comprehensive. It helps you to have, at a glance, a clear view of what's going on."
"Umbrella enables customers to be secure. We are happy with this and this is the most important benefit for customers."
"The insight into what our users are doing via Cisco Umbrella is valuable. Knowing that we're protecting our users as they leave our network is also valuable now because we've got more hybrid working."
"The solution is extremely stable. It has excellent performance."
"It's very powerful, especially for engineering teams."
"There are great security and ops features without the need for having a different box for security."
"The initial setup is simple."
"The flexibility is a great feature."
"I like all the features. We utilize different LAN, bandwidth transferring, bandwidth balancing, and mappings. We use it as a centralized solution, and use the same product at all our locations."
"The solution is stable and suitable."
"The necessary enhancement pertains to the controller segment, specifically addressing the issue of frequent flapping when a link is left. In the case of Versa Unified, if a link experiences frequent flapping within an entire branch, it triggers instability. Hence, it is imperative that the overall routing system is not contingent solely upon the active dial branches."
"The granularity when it comes to configuration and security features are valuable."
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"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"
"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 solution's technical support is not very good."
"The product can be pretty expensive."
"We would like them to add more features to Cisco Umbrella."
"There are some situations where we would like to block things for specific user groups. I know that Umbrella does that, but it's not that easy.... when you want a specific task for specific rules and policies for user groups, you have to go three levels down in the menu, and it's hard to find where you do that task."
"There are a couple of interface issues. I know that they say that there are feature enhancements that are noted. For example, we've got the Cisco Meraki security appliances, and there, we geofence our company to where we're allowed to send and receive traffic. So, in our case, by default, we only allow traffic to six different countries, which allows us to effectively prevent traffic for the majority of bad players in the world, but they don't give you an easy way to do that in Cisco Umbrella. With Cisco Meraki, I can specify or pick the countries. I can say that I want to only allow traffic from these six countries, and I'm done. With Cisco Umbrella, I have to rely on the fact that they're going to prevent traffic to other countries. They're going to decide if it's good or bad."
"The pricing is a bit high. Being outside of the USA, we have issues with the exchange rate."
"If a hardware platform were provided for Umbrella, that would definitely improve the market for it... Especially when we are addressing governmental customers, they hesitate to connect to the cloud. That is where we need a hardware platform so that the solution can be used on-premises as well."
"The pricing could be improved."
"The UTM features can be improved. It should offer better functionality."
"We've had the odd occasional stability issue with software upgrades."
"Certainly, there are areas that require enhancement, and the current focus is on improvements. Presently, I believe that the emphasis should be on enhancing user interface (UI) features, particularly over end devices. The issue arises when attempting to log in to Versa from other devices, as the UI is not device-specific. Consequently, guiding someone to log in to Versa antivirus becomes challenging. Despite the absence of issues on the website, the lack of a login scope impedes graphical representation of user data or databases. Since work databases support only a limited range of features, I recommend augmenting features for end devices to address these limitations."
"We are thinking about how to make customers consolidate the loads to an SD-WAN network so that the customers can have bigger chunk from the SD-WAN side so that customers can have critical data be transferred with NPS VPN and non-critical data or some labeled traffic can be transferred by the SD-WAN network. I think it's a very important direction for digital transformation."
"The support needs to be improved."
"With the pandemic and changing work models, it would be ideal if the product more accessibility options or more diversity within the solution itself."
"The solution lacks a mobile version where small, manageable platforms can be developed."
"I heard about them for the first time just before I started working on Versa. They do have blogs for information, but they could publicize more about the documentation and architecture. It doesn't seem to have that much exposure, and they should work on their customer base more."
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Cisco Umbrella is ranked 2nd in Secure Access Service Edge (SASE) with 108 reviews while Versa Unified Secure Access Service Edge (SASE) Platform is ranked 13th in Secure Access Service Edge (SASE) with 20 reviews. Cisco Umbrella is rated 8.8, while Versa Unified Secure Access Service Edge (SASE) Platform is rated 8.0. 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 Versa Unified Secure Access Service Edge (SASE) Platform writes "A flexible, stable and scalable solution ". Cisco Umbrella is most compared with Zscaler Internet Access, Microsoft Defender for Cloud Apps, Prisma Access by Palo Alto Networks, Palo Alto Networks DNS Security and Infoblox Advanced DNS Protection, whereas Versa Unified Secure Access Service Edge (SASE) Platform is most compared with Cisco SD-WAN, Fortinet FortiGate, VMware SD-WAN, Cato SASE Cloud Platform and Meraki SD-WAN. See our Cisco Umbrella vs. Versa Unified Secure Access Service Edge (SASE) Platform report.
See our list of best Secure Access Service Edge (SASE) vendors.
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