At Cisco Umbrella, we are obsessed with inventing new technologies to secure users everywhere, speed up the internet, and move the state of the art for the Domain Name System (DNS) forward. The Cisco Umbrella global network handles 200+ billion DNS requests daily — with 100% business uptime since 2006. But that’s not all.
Check out 10 good reasons to point your DNS to Cisco Umbrella
1. Better visibility to see internet activity
All internet activity is logged and categorized in real time using 85+ domain content categories. With our easy-to-use web interface, it’s simple to input your networks’ IP addresses and search, filter, export, or log this internet activity globally or per-network for 30 days.
2. Unmatched threat intelligence to block malware
Leveraging threat intelligence from Cisco Talos, one of the largest commercial threat intelligence teams in the world, Umbrella uncovers and blocks a broad spectrum of malicious domains, IPs, URLs, and files that are being used in attacks. We also feed huge volumes of global internet activity into a combination of statistical and machine learning models to identify new attacks being staged on the internet.
3. Highly scalable, automated defenses to keep your data safe
We have your back by implementing and innovating best-in-class DNS practices — from blocking or rate-limiting requests with unusual record types, excessive duplicate queries, excessive DNS records, or those sent from malicious client IPs, to adding entropy to our name server requests. We help shield infrastructure from malware, ransomware, malicious cryptomining, and C2 callbacks.
4. Hardened DNS resolver code reduces risk of exploits
Umbrella servers run a private fork of custom resolver software originally based on djbdns source code, which reduces the risk of exploits drastically. Related systems are always patched.
5. The first service to encrypt DNS traffic to secure the “Last Mile”
Just as SSL turns HTTP web traffic into HTTPS, Umbrella uses DNSCrypt to turn regular DNS into encrypted DNS traffic, easily securing the “last mile” of DNS traffic between you and the Umbrella resolvers. The optional endpoint client secures DNS from man-in-the-middle attacks without any changes to domain names or how they work.
6. Support for DNSSEC
Cisco Umbrella supports DNSSEC, a technology developed to protect against cache poisoning attacks by digitally signing data. Umbrella performs validation on queries sent from Umbrella resolvers to upstream authorities.
7. Transparent operational excellence
Umbrella’s network operations center maintains 24/7 watch over the entire internet for routing issues, as well as our global infrastructure for incidents. Since 2006, the Umbrella global network has delivered 100% reliability and business uptime. We believe in transparency – check out our 30-day view of operational messages via our system status.
8. Unbeatable performance and reliability with Anycast routing
Cisco Umbrella offers fast and secure internet access across network devices, branch offices, and roaming users. Umbrella’s DNS-layer security uses Anycast routing — every data center announces the same IP address, so requests are transparently sent to the fastest available with automated failover. Even if multiple locations go offline, there are no service disruptions because DNS requests are routed to get your users exactly where they need to go.
9. Over 900 peers at internet exchange points
Bye bye, latency. More than nine hundred peering partnerships with ISPs and CDNs provide shortcuts between networks, enabling us to resolve requests faster — and boost internet speed.
10. Smarter DNS cache technology
Substituting invalid responses with the last-known IP address enables a better internet experience. Our DNS record-handling technology renders frustrating authoritative DNS outages irrelevant for Cisco Umbrella users. If a domain’s authoritative name server becomes unreachable or misconfigured, Umbrella SmartCache lets you connect with confidence and returns the expired DNS response rather than an error.
