Cisco Umbrella

There’s lot of security products on the market – and plenty of scare stories about how you need to secure your network. If you use Cisco or Meraki, Cisco has an excellent set of products in the security space – and one of the major ones is Cisco Umbrella.

The Security Challenge

How do you secure your network today?

You probably have a firewall, maybe you have a web proxy and you probably run anti-virus on your client devices to try and stop malware.

Is it easy to implement your security policies across these elements, and how much visibility do you have of where your users are going?

How do you protect your users when they are not on your network - when they are working from home or out on the road? 

These are the challenges every business faces - the Cisco Umbrella suite can help with these - all via an easy managed GUI interface. Let's take a look.

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What is Cisco Umbrella?

Cisco Umbrella offers a complete package of security functionality that can help solve all of these concerns.

Cisco Umbrella is a suite of cloud-based tools that allow you to manage security at all levels from blocking connections to dangerous destinations to real-time inspection of content to prevent data loss.

As a suite, you get multiple tools, offering layered protection. Umbrella started as a DNS proxy, to filter out bad URL links and prevent you accessing sites you shouldn't (or more likely to prevent a bot calling him, in order for it to start executing its code and encrypt your machine).

Managing these tools is done through a single, easy-to-use dashboard that provides fine grained policy controls and unparalleled visibility and reporting. In the section below, we'll run through the tools that make up the Cisco Umbrella suite.

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Cisco Umbrella Key Elements

The key elements of Cisco Umbrella include:

• DNS-Layer Security: Checks destination hostnames to prevent access to dangerous sites before a connection is even attempted
• Cloud-Delivered Firewall: Provides a centrally managed firewall for all your sites, allowing control right up to the application layer
• Secure Web Gateway: Provides URL-level control and reporting and malware scanning of content
• Cloud Access Security Broker: Provide visibility into shadow IT and very fine-grained control over the use of cloud applications
• Data Loss Prevention: Real-time scanning to prevent sensitive data being transferred to unauthorised destinations
• Remote Browser Isolation: Access to risky destinations via a sandbox that prevents browser-based attacks from compromising endpoints

Backed by Cisco Talos - the largest, non-government threat research organisation in the world – Cisco Umbrella helps ensure your users remain protected at all times. 

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• Cisco Meraki Dashboard
• Wi-Fi Surveys
• Cisco Meraki Wireless Overview

Security Everywhere

With the use of the Cisco Secure Client, your users remain protected even when not at the office - working at home or visiting customers or suppliers.

The client ensures that all DNS and web traffic goes through Umbrella and has your security policies applied, regardless of where the user is located. 

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Cisco Umbrella: Summary

Hopefully this blog has been of use in helping you form an opinion about how you deploy defence in depth. This is built from a range of tools, each solving a different issue and preventing a set of specific risks to your business.

Cisco Umbrella provides a complete suite of tools that allow security for all your users and sites to be managed centrally and simply through a single dashboard.

It offers fine grained controls to implement policy, block malware and prevent data loss.

Cisco Umbrella scales to support the largest networks and is backed by a world-leading team of security researchers and analysts.

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If you need any help with your Cisco Umbrella implementation, we can help.