How a Mid-Market Education Network Replaced Cisco Umbrella With dope.security

Education IT lives at the intersection of “we run a serious workforce” and “we run a serious classroom,” and most SSE products only know how to talk to one of those audiences. This Cisco Umbrella alternative case study is what happened when a mid-market education network decided DNS filtering wasn’t enough for either audience.

The customer is a mid-market education organization in North America with a workforce split across teachers, administrators, and remote staff. They replaced Cisco Umbrella with dope.security and got dope.SWG and CASB Neural running across the managed estate inside the first month.

Quick read

• Industry: Education
• Replaced: Cisco Umbrella
• Deployed: dope.SWG, CASB Neural

Where things stood

Cisco Umbrella had been the answer for years. It blocked the obvious bad domains, satisfied a line item on the compliance checklist, and had quietly stopped being enough.

The CISO had a short list. Inspect HTTPS, because DNS filtering ended at the domain name and the actual content sat behind it. Get a view of what teachers and administrators put into OneDrive and Google Drive, where the lesson plans, case files, and parent communications now lived. Get a real answer on the AI tools showing up in classrooms every week. And keep the renewal honest, because Cisco quotes had grown every cycle. DNS filtering wasn’t going to solve any of that.

Why Cisco Umbrella stopped being enough

The same three gaps come up on every education buyer call. DNS filtering doesn’t see HTTPS payloads, so anything inside an encrypted request is invisible. The Umbrella SWG tier exists, but it backhauls through Cisco data centers, which moves the latency conversation from “no proxy” to “remote proxy” without fixing anything. And the SaaS tenant control story isn’t there, so you can’t separate corporate ChatGPT from personal ChatGPT on the same domain.

The CISO ran the bake-off looking for an architecture that didn’t have those three gaps.

Why an on-device proxy made the math work

dope.security’s fly-direct architecture moves the proxy onto the endpoint. Web filtering, SSL inspection, and policy enforcement happen on the device. There’s no cloud PoP to route through, no backhaul, no waiting in line behind another tenant’s traffic.

For an education network with staff on managed laptops in classrooms, offices, and home environments, that meant the SWG worked the same everywhere, with the same policy regardless of network. The team ran the migration in waves. Policy was authored in the dope.console and pushed to endpoints in minutes. The Cisco Umbrella tenant was decommissioned by the org unit. The whole sequence ran inside the first month, not the multi-quarter migration Cisco renewals usually assume.

CASB Neural picked up the data-at-rest side. The team scanned the network’s OneDrive and Google Drive tenants for files set to “anyone with the link” or shared externally. Inside the first few weeks they had a list of public links nobody had known existed. Most were old curriculum documents. A handful were not.

“Cisco Umbrella was fine when our threat model was ‘block malware domains.’ It stopped being fine when our threat model became ‘control what enters and leaves the laptop.’ dope.security closed that gap inside a month, and the renewal conversation went the other direction for the first time in years.”

— CISO, a mid-market education organization

The non-technical reason

Architecture and price got dope.security on the shortlist. The 24/7 white glove global support team got it across the line.

Education IT teams run lean. The CISO was not going to win a hire-three-people fight. The deal came down to whether the vendor’s support team would actually pick up the phone when something needed an answer. With dope.security, the customer was on a first-name basis with their support engineers inside the first month, and questions that used to live in a ticket queue came back as same-day answers.

What changed

Inside the first month, the team had SSL inspection running across every managed endpoint, a live view of every external share in OneDrive and Google Drive with a revocation workflow, and a defensible answer for the auditor and the school board. The renewal conversation got materially easier on the next cycle. The network got the SWG and CASB it should have had years ago, and the math worked.

FAQ

Why do education organizations replace Cisco Umbrella? The most common reasons we hear are DNS filtering not seeing HTTPS payloads, the SWG tier backhauling through Cisco data centers, missing SaaS tenant control for corporate-vs-personal accounts, and renewal quotes that grow every cycle. An on-device SWG closes those gaps in a single agent.

How fast is a Cisco-to-dope.security migration in education? Most migrations measure rollout in weeks, not quarters. The dope.security agent deploys via the existing endpoint management tool, the policy moves into dope.console, and the Cisco Umbrella client is decommissioned by org unit. The bulk of the elapsed time is policy review, not network engineering.

What does CASB Neural do for an education organization? CASB Neural scans OneDrive and Google Drive for files shared externally or set to “anyone with the link.” For an education environment, that includes curriculum documents, parent communications, and student-facing files that may have been set to broad sharing for convenience and never reset. The remediation workflow is in the same console as the SWG.

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.