Why I chose Cisco Meraki

Cisco’s Meraki portfolio is one of their largest growth drivers and certainly has helped them to grip a large share in the SD-WAN market. It is fair to describe Meraki as a cloud controlled network systems vendor, rather than just an SD-WAN vendor. Its’ product portfolio can cover many areas in an enterprise network and SD-WAN is one of the capabilities that Meraki products can deliver.

Tasked to evaluate technologies to deploy an enterprise SD-WAN, a few vendor products were considered. While there are many variants of vendors and product offerings available in the market, time constraints limited the evaluation to three vendors, and of those evaluated, Cisco Meraki seemed the best option and was chosen based on organizational requirements and aligned best with achieving the goals of the new WAN deployment. Furthermore, Meraki proved to be exceptional in the following domains.

• Quick to initialize & fast delivery — All three vendors offer free trials to potential new customers, and, with the exception of one the remaining two, including Meraki, were keen on getting a trial started. Cisco Meraki was very responsive from the beginning and timely in its correspondence during start up. Trial hardware was organized immediately and delivery was completed within 5 days. To date, all deliveries have adhered to the standard time of between 7–10 business days, while expert advice and guidance were made available throughout the trial phase and beyond.
• Easy & secure setup — Once the hardware arrived installation wasn’t very difficult. The central administration dashboard allows for convenient access and configure Assigning the hardware with a license and to an account is done via the serial numbers of the devices or via an order number and can be completed prior to hardware delivery . Configuration can also be prepared and saved in the dashboard prior to delivery of hardware. And upon delivery of the hardware the Meraki cloud can be accessed via an internet connection in order to download the configuration and the settings, after which the system will be ready to be deployed in the network
• Solutions to cover all areas of the network — Meraki’s portfolio comprises security, routing for the edge, switching , wireless, security cameras, mobile device management (MDM) and a monitoring platform, which covers all of the basic areas of an enterprise network. One of my requirements was to cover switching and wireless of the new network as well. Given that Meraki covers all three components mentioned, it was a factor that influenced the choice. Key takeaway from this point is that Meraki provides options for all areas in network connectivity. Combine that with having one single location to configure, manage and monitor, it offers the ease of management and flexibility.
• Simple to configure — Basics of how Meraki creates a network are all built upon networking fundamentals that have existed for years. IPSec tunnels being one of the key features that Meraki uses building a network. Beauty of this is that all the tunnel creation and brokering between the two endpoints are all done by the Meraki Cloud, automatically; no more manual work involved. This is one key point I want to use to highlight the fact that Meraki makes it easier to configure and deploy a network on scale, which will not only save time but also the hassle and effort required in memorizing commands & creating configuration templates for traditional command line interfaces. This is becoming more common for most SD-WAN vendors.

• Easy to integrate — Most of the standard configuration setup from the existing network can be transferred to Meraki Cloud, like for like and is easy to integrate with existing network setups. Features like enabling openDNS (Cisco Umbrella) for internet security & wireless is just a matter of following two or three steps through the dashboard. Also it appears Meraki is working behind the scenes in developing new features and functionality. In one instance where I wanted to get a feature enabled which was core to routing functionality. Within a matter of a few hours I had the functionality available in the dashboard. Also need to note that this was a functionality that Meraki had already developed but had not released to wider customer base, but if this wasn’t the case then there is an option in the dashboard “make a wish” to submit your requirements. There is a good chance that they develop new features and functionality at a relatively fast pace.
• Frictionless to patch & update — Meraki provides a very simple way to update and patch the systems which abide to most ITIL change controls practices. Once an update is available you can opt to schedule it for a convenient time or have the option of running it instantly. Usually the updates are quick to complete and without issues.
• Licensing- Licensing model was quite a key differentiator for choosing Meraki. It offers two modes of licenses; enterprise & advanced security, saves the confusion of having to chose many types like in traditional Cisco space. One of the main attractions is that it does not limit you for bandwidth usage. While Meraki only offers two WAN uplink connections to be used at once, the other two vendors compared offered licensing model based on bandwidth usage and have the ability to use more than two WAN connections. Meraki’s pro rata system in license calculation which provides customers to co-terminate the term for all devices is a convenient option when it comes to renewal and also a productive way to share the lifetime of the licenses among all devices under the organization. And there is also a grace period of 30 days to renew expired licenses which gives the organization ample time without impacting operations.

These were the main drivers behind choosing Meraki from a technical standpoint. But these are matching up with our particular use case and scenario. There are many vendors offering SD-WAN and SD-WAN+ solutions in many flavours at present day. It is imperative to have a clear understanding, clear set of goals and a vision before going to market to evaluate and choose a technology, which in most cases lack. To close out, it is best to consider at least three different technologies & vendors before pinning one down that suits the needs.