How Much Does Cisco Umbrella Cost?

If you are looking for a content filtering solution that will protect your business from web-based threats, Cisco Umbrella will no doubt be one of the solutions you look at, but how much does Cisco Umbrella cost?

Many cybersecurity solution providers offer price lists on their websites to allow potential customers to decide whether the solution falls within their budget. The lack of pricing on the Cisco website may give you an idea that cost is not a major selling point for Cisco. With Cisco Umbrella, the selling points are the comprehensiveness of the solution and the level of protection it provides. Bear in mind that Cisco Umbrella is one of the leading DNS filtering solutions that provides enterprise-level protection. As such, it has a price point to match.

How Much Does Cisco Umbrella Cost per User?

Cisco Umbrella pricing is at the top end of the price spectrum for DNS filtering. Based on a company with 100 users, the standard cost for Cisco Umbrella is $2.20 per user, per month. That means your annual bill for those 100 users will be $2,640. However, the price may well be higher than that, depending on the add-ons you require. Some of those add-ons are usually provided as standard by other DNS filtering solution providers. Support for instance.

If you pay the above price, you will not be left high and dry if there is a problem. The package includes email support, but not telephone support. If you have a problem that needs an immediate fix, this will not be ideal. Many businesses will feel they need to pay for support to ensure that they can get help immediately when needed.

There are also different packages available. At the most basic level, there is DNS Essentials. This package will provide you with a bare bones DNS filtering solution that will block malware and ransomware downloads and will allow you to enforce your acceptable internet usage policies through category-based filtering controls.

Two further packages are on offer, each including additional features along with all the features of the previous tiers. They naturally come at an increased cost. For enterprises that need greater protection and greater context during investigations, there is the DNS Security Advantage tier. The highest tier is Secure Internet Gateway (SIG) essentials. This top tier will be a must for many enterprises as it is the only package to offer decryption, inspection, and re-encryption of all SSL traffic, URL filtering, and the Cisco Threat Grid sandbox for analyzing suspicious files. These top two packages will increase the basic cost considerably.

Cisco Umbrella Competitor Pricing

There is no doubt that Cisco Umbrella is a highly accomplished product that offers a considerable range of features for enterprises, but SMBs may struggle to justify the cost, especially when budgets for new cybersecurity solutions are limited. For the cost of Cisco Umbrella, SMBs could pay for a Cisco Umbrella competitor product and still have enough money left other to pay for a third-party anti-phishing solution to layer on top of Office 365. That is likely to provide much greater value and better protection overall.

If you evaluate Cisco Umbrella competitors you are likely to find a somewhat reduced level of features, but you will benefit from a greatly reduced price. That said, the most important features of top package from Cisco Umbrella will be provided, support is likely to be included, and the solution will allow you to control the content that can be accessed by employees. The price for a Cisco Umbrella alternative is likely to be around $1 per user per month – A saving of around $1,440 per year. Some solution providers include most of the features of Cisco Umbrella for as low as 90c per user per month.

Author: Richard Anderson

Richard Anderson is the Editor-in-Chief of NetSec.news