Cisco Umbrella for Managed Services

In the highly competitive market of Managed Security Services (MSS), increasing operational efficiency is one of the top priorities for most leaders in the industry. Managing each customer’s products independently will increase the cost and add complexity. Tools that are purposely built for providers are important to reduce complexity and dashboard footprints. Cisco understands this requirement better than any other vendor.

Cisco Umbrella is a cloud-delivered security product. It combines multiple security functions into one solution, so Managed Service Providers (MSPs) can effortlessly extend data protection to devices, remote users, and distributed office locations anywhere. Umbrella is also known as one of the easiest products in the industry to deploy in minutes. It extends its easy-to-use attribute by adding another feature for MSPs–theManaged Services Console (formerly MSSP Console), a consolidated management console for MSPs* and Managed Security Service Providers (MSSPs).

*MSP for MSLA

The Umbrella Managed Services (MS) Console is designed to empower Cisco partners to easily orchestrate, manage and operate their environments with fewer dashboards. The console is built-in with prevailing features like multi-tenancy design for console which allows MSPs to add, remove and modify Umbrella child-orgs (or customers) without impacting other customers. All the child-orgs will be listed which makes it easy to switch in and out between customers to make any changes at any time. There are a few re-built filters in the console to narrow down the customer list.

Centralized reporting provides a single-pane-of-glass view of the entire customer base. The reporting page contains a summary of deployment health, security activities and even highlights issues that requires the service provider’s attention.

Centralized settings provides provider-level policy which will be placed at the topmost level of policy hierarchy. There may be some use cases where a provider needs to configure a policy and enforce it for all or a few of their customers. Rather than configuring individually by switching into each customer account, providers can use centralized setting features to make this task easier.

Note: currently only Umbrella DNS packages are supported. Support for SIG packages are on the roadmap.

The Customer Management feature helps providers to take out most of the manual work like managing customer trials in a spreadsheet. The console is designed to easily spin up new trials, extend trials and convert trails into subscriptions in a few clicks. Providers can create trials and manage child-orgs with different Umbrella packages. Both Term-based license- and MSLA license– (Pay-as-You-Go) based customers are supported as well.

Integration and Automation is another important part of Managed Services. With new Umbrella APIs which are use case-based, providers can have a key-pair for each task. It also provides the flexibility to select the appropriate access scope on each Umbrella resource with two privilege options: 1) Read/Write or 2) Ready-Only. There are two main sets of APIs. One works at the provider level to get the consolidated view of all the child-orgs and the other set of APIs works at the tenant level for reporting and third-party security integration.

What this means for Partners

Reduce deployment RISK by enabling Cisco’s cloud-based solution with proven best practices and MSP specific tools
Speed deployment of services to accelerate solution ROI
Using APIs, embrace an integrated ARCHITECTURAL approach for scalability, stability and performance to deliver high quality Managed Services

There are few reequipments that need to fulfil by a partner to gain access to Umbrella Managed Services Console. Please refer the Cisco Umbrella for MSSPs requirement guide.

But please do not hesitate to try the MSP or MSSP console. Request a trial here today!

Additional Resources

Interested in becoming a Cisco Partner? Learn more about Partner Managed Services.

Already a Cisco Partner? Learn about the Umbrella MSSP program.