The Alternative to Cisco Umbrella That Closed Out a Mid-Market Audit Finding

The finding landed on a Monday. The auditor's report sat at the top of the CISO's inbox, with a single line highlighted in yellow: the firm's existing web security control didn't produce inspection-grade traffic visibility at the endpoint. The CISO had been telling people for a year that DNS resolution alone wasn't going to clear the bar a regulator would draw around traffic inspection. Now she had it in writing from an external auditor. The search for an alternative to Cisco Umbrella started before lunch.

This was a mid-market professional services firm in commercial real estate. The fleet was a few thousand endpoints. The workforce was a mix of brokers, transaction managers, valuation analysts, and back-office staff handling sensitive client material every day. The firm had been a Cisco Umbrella customer for years. DNS-layer filtering had been good enough to satisfy earlier reviewers. The current review wasn't earlier reviewers.

The first week after the finding

The CISO assembled a small group to scope the response. The auditor's controls list specifically asked for traffic-level evidence on every endpoint, not just network-edge logging. That requirement ruled out a class of tools that did inspection only at a corporate gateway. The CISO opened the comparison of the top Cisco Umbrella replacements on her second screen the morning she briefed the leadership team, and she had a short list by the end of that day.

The first week was about scoping the gap. The team pulled audit-trail samples from Umbrella to show the leadership team exactly what visibility they did and didn't have. DNS resolution categories were there. HTTPS request paths were not. SSL inspection was a feature tier the firm didn't have configured, and the SWG component that would have enabled it backhauled through a regional cloud the architecture team had been working around.

The eval against the audit timeline

The CISO had ninety days to demonstrate progress against the finding. That meant pilot, decision, rollout, and an updated audit-evidence package in a quarter. She picked three vendors. Two finalists were enterprise SSE platforms the firm had heard about. The third was dope.security, surfaced through a peer who had moved off Umbrella a few months earlier.

The dope.security pilot ran on a few dozen broker and back-office laptops over two weeks. The console produced exactly the kind of traffic-level evidence the auditor wanted, on every device in the pilot. The CISO had read the case for next-gen SWG the week before and the live pilot data matched the architecture argument: full SSL inspection on the endpoint, no hairpin, audit-ready logs.

The CISO compared the dope.security agent against the alternatives on the dimensions the audit cared about. Inspection completeness on HTTPS traffic. Per-endpoint audit-trail granularity. Time from agent install to first auditable log. Policy model that mapped cleanly to the firm's controls list. The dope.security agent passed all four checks in the pilot.

Quick read

• Industry: Professional Services (commercial real estate)
• Replaced: Cisco Umbrella
• Deployed: dope.SWG

What rollout looked like

The team rolled out the agent across the firm in stages, brokers first, transaction managers second, back-office last. The on-device, fly-direct model meant no per-site network change. The firm had offices scattered across several markets, and the team didn't have to schedule appliance work at any of them. The MDM pushed the agent, the policy applied on first launch, and the console began logging real traffic against real users.

The auditor came back at the end of the quarter. The evidence the audit response committee handed over was the kind of per-endpoint traffic visibility the finding had asked for. The auditor closed the finding inside two weeks of receiving the updated package.

The 24/7 white glove global support team did the work the CISO needed it to do. There was a named engineer in her contacts the day the contract closed, and that engineer ran the pilot and the production rollout. The Slack channel didn't have a ticketing widget. It had people. Response times stayed in single-digit minutes the whole way through. The CISO read the Cisco Umbrella review of 2025 as part of the eval and the support contrast was material to her recommendation.

"We had ninety days and an audit finding. dope showed up the same week, gave us the evidence the auditor wanted, and stayed in the channel until we'd cleared it."

- CISO, a mid-market professional services organization

What changed

• The audit finding closed inside the quarter, on the strength of inspection-grade endpoint visibility.
• HTTPS inspection ran on every endpoint, replacing DNS-only categorization.
• The firm's controls list and the dope.SWG policy model lined up cleanly, which simplified subsequent reviews.
• No per-site network appliance work was needed for the rollout.
• The renewal cycle moved off a posture of "what are we missing" to "what do we want to add next."

FAQ

Q: How fast can dope.SWG produce audit-ready evidence?

The traffic-level logs start populating in the console as soon as the agent is enrolled and policy is applied, which is typically the same day. For audit purposes, the firm in this case had inspection-grade evidence within the first week of the pilot.

Q: Did the firm need to change its network to deploy?

No. The fly-direct architecture puts policy on the endpoint, so the firm did not stand up new appliances or tunnels in any of its offices. The rollout happened through MDM.

Q: Can the policy model demonstrate alignment with a specific controls list?

The policy structure is permissive enough that the firm mapped its controls list to dope.SWG policy categories without rewriting the controls. The audit committee carried the same controls language between the policy spec and the audit-evidence package.

About dope.security

dope.security, the Distributed On-device Proxy Endpoint, is the preferred security vendor for security leaders across SMBs, midsize enterprises, Fortune 500 companies, and the world's top VC and PE firms. Deployed in 83 countries, dope.security protects web, data, and AI traffic globally through its patented fly-direct architecture.