Geo-location support for Google

Problem

Umbrella utilizes anycast routing. When you configure your network to send traffic to the Umbrella servers, your traffic could be routed through any of the locations listed on our System Status page, depending on geographical distance, peering, congestion, and other measures.

Some websites and content delivery networks provide different results based on the IP-Geolocation they detect for the user.  Using Umbrella can affect the geo-location results you receive.  The behaviour encountered will depend primarily on the Umbrella Data Center location that the traffic arrives from. As a result, some websites may not display pages that match where the user is located geographically (for example, a user in Italy maybe routed to our Frankfurt datacenter, resulting in websites displaying in German instead of Italian).

Solution

Umbrella SWG supports geo-location pass-through for many services, including Google. Umbrella inserts the customer's source IP into proxied HTTP requests using X-Forwarded-For (XFF) or Forwarded headers. Any site that honors XFF headers will use the customer's geolocation instead of the Umbrella data center's geolocation.

This is automatic and requires no configuration.

Requirements:

• HTTPS decryption must be enabled in the Umbrella web policy
• Destination website must honor XFF headers

Supported connection types:

• AnyConnect, proxy chaining, PAC file, or IPsec tunnel

Unsupported connection types:

• Meraki Cloud On-Ramp

Note: If you are experiencing issues confirm that all requirements are met, and then check the geolocation of your IP address using a service such as MaxMind or IP2Location