Cisco Umbrella Explained

CSA Editorial October 28, 2022

2 minutes read

The days when the humble firewall could mostly keep the bad guys out of an organisation’s network are a thing of the past. Nowadays, with the rise of the mobile workforce and the emergence of the cloud, a lot more stuff is occurring off-network, and this is opening gaps that threat actors are exploiting more and more.

Needless to say, it is imperative that those gaps are closed, and that is exactly what the Cisco Umbrella can do for you. The Cisco Umbrella, a propriety innovation by Cisco, is a cloud security platform that provides an organisation with comprehensive protection against a variety of internet threats, whether within the network or off it. This means your workforce, wherever they are in the world, can use the world wide web with peace of mind.

A good way to describe Cisco Umbrella is that it can be an organisation’s first line of defence against threats on the web. It is a secure internet gateway that offers threat protection unlike any other by stopping malware, phishing, ransomware, command-and-control callbacks, and other threats dead in their tracks. It provides robust security because it is an all-in-one firewall, secure web gateway and a cloud access security broker—with protection even at the domain name system level.

Critically, this best-in-class threat protection is automated, enabling it to uncover malicious activities even before they can do damage to your network. Cisco Umbrella also delivers complete visibility across all users, devices and locations, thereby ensuring that compromised systems and targeted attacks are identified—in real-time.

On top of all that, Cisco Umbrella is highly intelligent as well, able to analyse internet activity patterns and learn from them. This allows Cisco Umbrella to automatically detect staged attacks, proactively block requests to malicious web destinations, identify already infected devices and stop phishing and malware attacks early.

Finally, and this is just as important, Cisco Umbrella is cloud-native, thereby making it easy to deploy and manage. Being in the cloud also means that Cisco Umbrella is able to extend comprehensive protection to all users, devices and locations—but without the need for often complicated and time-consuming deployment configurations.

To put it simply, Cisco Umbrella is the security platform you need in this ever-evolving digital world. It simplifies internet protection and fills in gaps created by today’s highly distributed and increasingly global workforce.

Then again, we know that choosing a Secure Internet Gateway provider—or a cybersecurity vendor for that matter—can be a daunting task, with serious implications in case you choose incorrectly. And that’s precisely why we have prepared for you the CSA Decision-Maker’s Checklist for Choosing a Secure Internet Gateway (SIG). By accomplishing this checklist, you will be able to craft a set of criteria that will help you choose the right security vendor for your specific security needs. You can check out this checklist on the link below.