With Cisco Live! 2015 happening in Milan, Cisco has stepped up to the plate to do a little “mythbusting” regarding three of the biggest myths surrounding their Meraki family of solutions, once and for all.
Three Meraki Myths You Probably Believed Until Now
1. Meraki is Just About Wireless
Cisco is at pains to point out that Meraki is a full range of network solutions, and is certainly about more than just wireless. This week they’ve added intelligent IWAN routing to Meraki's location analytics, next-gen firewalls, auto VPN and content filtering. These additions exist over and above the switching, firewalls and cloud management that formed part of the Meraki product set when Cisco acquired Meraki in 2012.
2. Meraki is Just Small Business Targeted
A prevalent belief has been that Meraki is a small business solution, not really suited to larger-scale companies, but this couldn’t be further from the truth. Cisco points out that Meraki is a global network class enterprise IT solution, and is already installed and utilised in a wide variety of organisations varying in size. They even quoted a client, Penn Mutual, who said “We had to pinch ourselves, it’s really that simple."
3. Meraki Cloud Management Forces Organisations to Choose Between Cloud or On Premise Management
While cloud-based management of Meraki is incredibly simple to do, Cisco stated that NS does dovetail elegantly with on premise management solutions already implemented by customers, and also integrates with many other Cisco solutions already available.
Frankly, our biggest reaction to Cisco’s need to make these announcements was surprise – we’d always thought that this knowledge regarding Meraki was a given. We’ve worked with Meraki both before and after Cisco’s acquisition of the company, and all points indicated it to be the best-in-class solution across organisations of all sizes. Deployment has never been easier, just send the box to the intended location and ask the staff on site to plug it in. Everything else is managed centrally through the cloud.
Having deployed Meraki many times before, we’ve never failed to be impressed with the quality, performance, design, ease of deployment and and efficient cloud management across the whole product set. It’s a high performance, cost effective solution, especially where a small IT team supports networks across multiple locations. If you’ve never heard the name Meraki before, maybe it’s time to check it out.
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